"The title of David Salner's volume of new and selected poems alludes to a story told by Plutarch of a land where winter is so cold that words freeze when spoken, audible only later with the thaw of summer. His are the poems of this thaw, as he gives voice to stories suspended in memory and history, specifically working-class history, beginning with his Hungarian grandparents sailing to a New World "brilliant with vagueness" in its promise of dreams attainable through work and struggle. These largely are poems of labor and laborers still in pursuit of such dreams, of the mines and mills and farms and forests where he has worked and of those he met along the way, a mosaic of an America where he has "gotten crazy / in towns that no longer exist." (The librarian is here too, in poems referencing Melville and Galileo's daughter among others out of the world of words.) These poems are themselves the product of dedicated labor, precise in their workmanship and attention to detail. More than anything, there is a real affection in these pages, for the dignity of work and the satisfaction at the end of a hard day: "if I still smoked / I'd pass a crush-proof pack to you, and we'd / exhale the dust and watch it circle / toward a dying sun, the two of us.""--