Scholar in Comparative Religion and co-author of Shlomo's Stories (Jason Arson), Mesinai was chosen one of Columbia University's 250 'greatest graduates' for her search for Raoul Wallenberg and other foreign prisoners who disappeared into the Soviet Gulag after World War II. Although she has published occasionally in New York, San Francisco, and Japan-this is her first book of poetry.

"Susan Mesinai's poems are spiritual, inquisitive, and generous-an alchemy of language. With imagistic lines and surprising off-rhymes, their many cadenced voices range from Raoul Wallenberg's isolation cell to Jacob's ladder-totem-pole; Kali's broad sweeping grounds to a mother's mother's healing well; a daughter who "...plants her feet on mine ... laughing backwards" to a wife's full moon face, "braver than any war." I'm grateful for these new connections to this bright, agile world of constantly renewing relationships." -Christianne Balk, Author of Bindweed and Desiring Flight

"Susan Mesinai, activist, poet, moral conscience, sends dispatches from a spiritual battlefront...lyrical, personal, fiercely honest, an American Akhmatova, Mesinai bears witness to the madness of her time, and to hard-won moments of sanity and hope in this incandescent collection of poems." -Marcus Boon, York University, Author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs