"We've stripped the beds, both flower and sea, / emptied every larder back to bones" writes Emma Wynn in this collection of unsparing poems on the legacies of human brutality-to the natural world, other animals, our children, and ourselves. In its pages, we wander in "muted forests" emptied of birds. A father passes his demons and will to survive on to his children. In an interlude of "found" poems, queer historical figures struggle in secret to escape "a buried kind of life." Wynn offers no absolution, but a vision: that we can bear and love what is, just as we are: "rocked in the decaying, astonishing world."