As a poet and a native of Rimertown, North Carolina, Laura Walker is uniquely poised at the intersection of two breakwaters—home as it is known, and home as it is created. Her second collection is at once, as its name suggests, a conspectus—an effort at charting the particularities of place and experience—and an interrogation of the language through which such places are known. It is an atlas of illustration, of landscapes interior and exterior, and an exploration of the lives lived there. As variegated as the landscapes it traces, Walker’s atlas consists of four forms in concert: “maps,” “stories,” vernacular prose poems, and a sparse, disjunctively reiterative narrative. These forms interact, whispering among themselves, repeating what they’ve heard, in much the same way we imagine the inhabitants of Rimertown speaking—in hushed tones and a language of their own.

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—Thomas Hummel