Another brilliant book of poems from Rebecca Schumejda that reads like a memoir or a novel. Characters appear, disappear, and re-appear. They lose jobs. They lose houses. They lose lovers. They lose family members to jail. They take parts from one car to build another. The one-way street is desolate, yet filled with love and, if not hope, compassion. People show up with cookies and garden vegetables and they watch each others' kids. They wave and smile and listen and share beers. They buy ice cream for other peoples' kids when no one has money for extras. This is a book about being decent when the world is no longer decent, when the world is set to screw you over. A sewing machine runs through a long stretch of this book: a woman looking for a sewing machine in a pawnshop bumps into an old friend who offers her own sewing machine; the sewing-machine swap is set to happen at a bar but the woman in need has been 86'ed for guzzling tequila; the sewing machine gets sold at a yard sale; the woman who wanted the sewing machine calls drunk at 2 in the morning, asking for the sewing machine, crying; the woman who sold the sewing machine finds one sitting on the side of the road when her neighbor moves out; it's endless, our needs and our willingness to help. The poems about the sewing machine, like the rest of the poems in this book, are stitched together with desperation, a long thread that holds all our lives together. Rebecca Schumejda knows were all doomed, but the characters in the book won't allow her to pound nails in their coffins. I love that.