This is a thoughtfully organized, well-paced volume of emotional poetry that gets sadder and more visceral as the book moves along. "I am not afraid of sadness," Hieu Minh Nguyen writes in one of the final poems. But by the end, I was pretty sad. Learning how to love other people, learning how to grieve people who aren't even gone yet, learning what it means to have a body (especially a body other people don't like, or that you don't think other people like): these are some of the themes that came up. The poetry itself isn't always as strong as I'd like—I don't have anything else to say about that, really. But the poems pick up and the themes develop like a painful narrative as the volume progresses. The story isn't pretty, but it's honest.