“Schaffer’s poems navigate a city of contradictions. The narrator, like all who live in this city, moves among the ruins of an illustrious past she cannot reach out and touch: in this city, presence and absence are one and the same. And yet this paradox offers the poet her most playful, dazzling surprises...”

-Jessica Harkins, author of The Paled Guest

“These poems take great pleasure in the tension between the ripeness of the present moment and the grandeur of a past that refuses to completely disappear. Tasting both melancholy and intense joy, these are odes to the impossible but seemingly intrinsic human quest for eternity. Schaffer asks a question about afterlives, “How does one locate the source of / a fire when it has already combusted?” This lively, perceptive collection by a young poet attuned to the hallucinatory nature of an ancient city is a dedication to the eros of slow erosion, “dreams of duality / the ruined and the pristine.””

-Sun Yung Shin, author of Unbearable Splendor