Conscious of politics and of music, these poems continue Conoley's explorations into the questions of grace and redemption, self and other, death in life, language and being, democracy and song. This collection takes its title from Italian philosopher and critic Giorgio Agamben's notion of a post-rapturous world whose figures roam the earth, striving to find new community, new meaning.

Gillian Conoley's collections include Lovers in the Used World, Beckon, Tall Stranger (nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Some Gangster Pain and the chapbooks Woman Speaking Inside Film Noir and Fatherless Afternoon. Winner of several Pushcart Prizes, the Jerome J. Shestack Award in Poetry and included in Best American Poetry, she is poet-in-residence and professor at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt.