“Kristin George Bagdanov has a gift of being able to make lyrics from our daily moments; she finds depth where others only see surfaces; she finds mystery and sets that mystery to music. Her method is impersonal intimacy, she says. This is the intimacy of living with our 21st century vocabulary, our 21st century problems, our 21st century issues—and, yet, finding in all of that the music of waking thought. ‘I am on a verge of waking,’ she says, ‘I find an edge inside myself and push.’ This is an intricate, compelling, necessary work.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“Every morning the mind wakes up and reminds itself it is itself, and every night, tired of the endeavor, it lets itself forget. In between, in those waking hours, we think, or think we think, and it is in those skeptical, hypothetical, insecure, brazen, shallow, wonder-struck, wanting, worrying hours that Kristin George Bagdanov’s small book of poetry-philosophy works its necessary work. Her method—a line for every waking hour—lets us glimpse the ever-wounded mind who in its myriad cares knows everything but how to make sense of it all, how exactly to say ‘I.’ So it is she offers us a gift, as real poetry must, not of knowledge, but of learning ever more honestly to say ‘I don’t know’—& yet, so much is known, so much knows us. I want to say this book teaches me that we all wake every day into a Daedalean labyrinth, none of us think we have a thread, but we have the threads that are thoughts, thousands of them. They might not rescue us, but as George Bagdanov so beautifully knows, it isn’t rescue we want, but learning to be more mindfully lost.” —Dan Beachy-Quick, author of gentlessness and Of Silence and Song

“‘Many still set the aesthetic against the political,’ worries the text, refusing to do the same, also refusing to pretend the difficulty has been overcome. Instead it lies down with the difficulty and says, ‘I wait for a poem to wake me up,’ while generously offering poem after poem that does the trick and sets us leaping.” —Joshua Clover, poet and professor at the University of California Davis.