Heredity and Other Inventions

"Sharona Muir's Heredity and Other Inventions radiate like elements discovered late at night after years of searching … a rocket in a museum in another country is both public knowledge and family secret; a daughter's umbilical cord in her father's lab sparks questions about the uses of love; the body of an airplane holds the imagined gestures of humans in their fi nal moments of life … Muir renders the physical world so unfl inchingly that the metaphysical blows back, in equal and opposite reaction … these poems are an act of postmortem collaboration: daughter as witness to history, using language to weld and spark familial bonds and to summon up their mysteries." -Rebecca Klaver, author of Empire Wasted "… Muir has a gift for conjuring beauty in the least expected places, dazzling audiences with rich imagery … While the speaker's narrative is particular to her unique experience, in many ways this chapbook's poems transcend place and time, and resonate with all who have looked to the past for a way of understanding the present." -Mary Biddinger, author of Small Enterprise