Blank verse poems about history, culture, and language. Like a literal road atlas, the poems carry lines and themes from one to the next. Like Atlas holding up the world, they hold patterns of all kinds aloft with an attention that transforms. The poems also are an atlas of the known world, capturing the way events repeat across time and place, as in one poem that links the image of her sister, pausing in her work as housekeeper, with the contours of a maid in a Vermeer painting and a womanjust made over\" on that day's episode of Oprah. Vandenberg's poems use family artifacts, memory, and imagination to plot the intersections of love, death, history, art, and desire. In the first section, \"Trade Routes,\" about connections, each poem moves back one generation to investigate the ways events reverberate across time. The second section, \"The Red Fields of Lisse (A Love Story),\" focuses on a former partner, a hemophiliac with AIDS, and tulips. The third section, \"Catalog of Want,\" contains poems about desire in various guises. The last section, \"A Place Ten Years Away,\" reexamines the themes of the first three sections. \""Katrina Vandenberg lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is the visiting writer in residence at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Vandenberg was a Fulbright fellow in the Netherlands in 1999Ñ2000 and has held an artist residency at the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Redwing, Minnesota. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, American Scholar, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. | Atlas, Paperback | Indigo Chapters