FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY DIANE WAKOSKI:
Her clever romance with television detectives is a trope I’ve never seen used in poetry. As she persistently asks Wallender, Columbo, Inspector Morse, Luther, Jane Tennison, even Sherlock Holmes, to search for her if she goes missing, she can speculate on the many ways the dread of disappearing can overshadow a woman’s life. Knight has turned this wonderful and engaging trope of the television detective into some memorable and, really, life saving observations—in the closing poem, “Just Rising,” she offers “fierce opposition” to giving in, to becoming invisible.

Knight’s images of beautiful objects to be found in her world, even catalogues of them, are varied and mysterious in each poem. In fact, catalogues are a dominant feature of many of Knight’s poems—not necessarily long and always relevant, they often lead to revelations about who she really is, not where she is.

Small Blue Eggs
—Wallender
If I go missing,
send Kurt Wallende
to find me. He can cypher
my icy subtitles still fingered
on the bathroom mirror.

His thumb will stroke
the objects I leave behind
like small blue eggs, robin sized,
unwrap tissue from
the delicate snake bones
we found in the juniper woods,
finger the limestone rock,
retrieved for a kiss
from the bottom
of Half Moon Lake—
all my childish things—

open the lacquered box
that holds spare keys,
inspect a fragment
of driftwood stolen
from the river’s mouth.

If I go missing,
he will glimpse
the horizon folding
into the dunes,
the sandpipers dithering
in the strand,
and know that
I would flee.