Offers poems capturing the life of a soldier, including waiting in the dusty Middle Eastern heat and writing a love letter back home.

Letter composed during a lull in the fighting -- Great plain -- Inheritance -- Blue star mother -- Independence day -- Valentine with flat affect -- Elegy for urgency -- Meditation on a main supply route -- Improvised explosive device -- self-portrait in sidewalk chalk -- A history of yards -- Death, mother and child -- Field manual -- After leaving McGuire Veterans' Hospital for the last time -- Separation -- Actuary -- Photographing the suddenly dead -- Cumberland Gap -- The torch and pitchfork blues -- Fighting out of West Virginia -- In the ruins of the ironworks -- Songs in planck time -- The abhorrence of coincidence -- While trying to make an arrowhead in the fashion of the Mattaponi Indians -- The locks of the James -- Church Hill -- Nominally -- Corona -- An alternate history of the destruction of Dresden by fire -- Portugal -- Advice to be taken just before the sun goes supernova -- A lamp in the place of the sun -- Grace note.