Raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana, Kevin Goodan began working for the U.S. Forest Service at a young age, and attended the Universities of Montana and Massachusetts. He has lived in Northern Ireland, and lectured at universities on terrorism. His poems have been published in Ploughshares and other journals. Kevin Goodan lives in the Upper Valley Region of New Hampshire, where he operates a small-scale sustainable logging enterprise.

"Decades ago I wrote Kevin Goodan—not knowing him personally—to thank him for his first book. Now I'm writing you, reader, to alert you to his eighth book, which is as startlingly beautiful as the first. Here death and danger are very close, as the earth and people and creatures unfold both beauty and brutality with heartbreaking specificity. Here is the ice-bent birch, the hue of suet, the whisper of swallows, the annealing muck of thaw. Here is the emerald ash borer, killing all the trees. Here are the dead, who, because of their distressing vitality of their stories, never retreat very far. Here is a father trying to cheer his chronically ill young son with dirty jokes. Again and again this poet says he doesn't know why things are as they are, which makes me trust everything he says. The tender mouthfeel of language itself is this book's religion, telling of Lacrimae rerum, the deep-down tears of things the ancients sang about. Here this superb poet mashes the ugly apples he's been given—the book is the press—making for us a cider that's 'dark and sweet in the morning light.'"
—Patrick Donnelly, author of Willow Hammer, Little-Known Operas, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge.