Lyric poems set in the author's native Northwest. Written over the course of a decade, Derek Sheffield's first collection is the work a mature artist assured in his craft and at home in a variety of forms. It is the poetry of the human, middle ground, of distances approached but not yet arrived at; of reflection—of "bears watching us watching them." Informed without being literary or academic, at once experienced and digested, the poems in Through the Second Skin share their secrets in intimate, respectful equipoise.