6"Attachment is the puzzle." Three years after her mother's death and on the brink of a break up, a bisexual writer sits in the company of an urban birch tree, auditing the odds of new loves entering her future. So begins Dear Birch, an intimate poem cycle that improvises within the permutability of grief, wind, reading, refusal and desire, listening for an ethos of ongoingness. Synthesizing memoir, votive and epistle, Margaret Christakos displays her trademark fidelity to writing as attentive process, imbuing her work with the polyamory of tender intelligence.