"'Why can't Jesus / come already? We're a mess.' Indeed, Rodeo is that brand of backslap--furious and cunning and deftly crafted, by no means reluctant to say the whispered stuff out loud. This book rises above a tough and formidable field simply by not needing to rise at all--the poet's wry and revelatory stanzas ride high through minefields of love and heart-numbing loss before accompanying the reader on, in the poet's own words, 'a slow descent into the heart of the world.'" --Patricia Smith, Prize Judge and author of Unshuttered

"Sunni Brown Wilkinson's latest collection is fueled by that most harrowing of losses, the death of a child. Remarkably, the resulting pieces are not so much jeremiad as elegy, not so much documentary as hard-scrabble celebration. These pages are peopled by neighbors and misfits, strangers and family and creatured by skunks and badgers and coyotes eating hot dogs behind Conoco. What do these agents have in common? They've figured out how to survive. Over and over, this collection smudges the line between the remarkable and the quotidian. Poets have been singing the West for at least a couple centuries but not the way Wilkinson does it. Here we have écriture feminine, with plenty of room to re-write the female body via chaps and spurs, Buddha and Wonder Woman, tents and blackberry jam, meteor showers and family trees. --Lance Larson, author of Making a Kingdom of It

"Sunni Wilkinson's poetry shines out vulnerable and triumphant, vatic and broken with death and love--and we are naked for all of it. Sometimes tickled by unexpected rhyme, sometimes teased into sinuous rhythm, these poems urge us across the page like daring offerings at the feet of the great Nature we are part of--and that is part of us. --Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems