Gatherest defiantly attests to intimacy and our binding humanness amidst an alienating present. In three elegant poems, brushes with contemporary violence are met with meditations on kinship and communication alongside coursing reflections on the elemental foundations that borne and ground our existence. “Daughter,” she addresses, “people are not bad / not evil / people want to be like water / and go where currents send them.” Both candid and hopeful, Steensen stares down modern anxieties, embraces vulnerability and presents empathy as an antidote to pervasive chaos. “To not deny the heart, to not deny the head, to not deny the bewildering thread that stitches doubt to faith and ties heaven to earth—such is the work Sasha Steensen gathers to herself in this necessary and beautiful book, where the poems announce themselves as their ‘own / kind of worship.’ Somewhere deep in the inward turn toward mind are those worries that reverse our attention back out into the world—not as idea or as ideal, but as the undeniable fact of what exists. Gatherest gathers that loving, needing-to-be-loved, mob of anxious affections into pages where the fundamental elements of life—water and fire, birth and death, plant and animal, grammar and disorder—turn thought’s terror tender. It is one thing to love a book (and this book I do); it’s another thing to realize a book has taught you something about love (and this book has). In these pages, ‘where cogito and coitus meet,’ thinking returns to its ancient, intimate agony—where the one who says I is never alone, but is lovingly occupied by the various forms of care.” —Dan Beachy-Quick