"James Fujinami Moore's debut poetry collection reminds us that America is not a Promised Land but a mutable place we inhabit. It is a country shaped by lust and heartbreak, parental pride and discomfort, nebulous mythologies, and large and small acts of violence born of boredom, of boyhoods, of unchecked power, of stereotypes and racial slurs. The book's great energy resides in Moore's willingness to ask: How has America shaped the people it never vowed to love and protect? How heavy the memories lying by at night? At once witty and weary and always with an eye on the animal kingdom and the natural world, Moore's collection will rattle you with its close examinations and indecent answers, with its refusal to look away."
--Yona Harvey

"James Fujinami Moore's poems possess the uncanny capacity to be at once unsettled and unnervingly lucid. It is this particular power that fuels his searing investigations--into the intimate relationships between representation and violence, into how families and countries take shape around those who are missing. Moore's poems are urgent, achingly searching, unflinching. Here is a poet who moves as he needs to-- flipping foreground and background, rewinding and replaying, refusing the distortions of fear."
--Mary Szybist