From the back cover: "Mattie McClane (Kristine A. Kaiser) records the artist's struggle for relevancy in a material world. Her poems reference the public and the private realms. She offers prayers for the people of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina and scatters notes of current events throughout her poetry. At the same time, her poetry is strikingly private, honestly probing the anxieties of being a poetess in an era when poetry is a lost art. McClane is a graduate of Augustana College, earning a B.A. in the Humanities. She holds an M.A. in English from the University of Louisville and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She has studied under Alison Lurie and Sena Naslund as far as fiction and under Dennis Sampson in poetry. McClane works as a columnist in the Piedmont region of North Carolina and has published political commentary regularly for several years. Mattie McClane is the author of Night Ship: A Voyage of Discovery, Wen Wilson, and Unbuttoning Light: the Collected Short Stories of Mattie McClane. Now Time is her first book of poetry."