In answer to Seamus Heaney's Station Island and Pablo Neruda's The Heights of Machu Picchu, Berger unmasks the worldview of westward expansion from architect Eero Saarinen's arch in St. Louis to the Golden Gate in a way that subtly and mystically taps the unconsciousness of the intended audience. When she writes "We never entered the West on bended knee," the impurity of language used in this epic creates tension between discourses and creates a charge or pressure on each sentence that pushes the reader toward declaring an allegiance. Drawing on historical documents, the Latin Mass, and multivalent voices, Berger moves through the anguish of unintended consequences and leads the reader through the "ghost dance" of feeling to the powerful Pacific Ocean, which enters human consciousness like a dream. Entangled historical memory, climate crisis, and inverse expansionism compress into a spiritual reckoning to face the world to come.

Rose Marie Berger, poetry editor at Sojourners magazine, is author of Syllables of the Perfect Word (2004) and Who Killed Donte Manning? The Story of an American Neighborhood (2010), co-author with Janet Gottschalk of Drawn By God, and co-editor with Joseph Ross of Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib Paintings (2007). She was raised in the American River watershed, in traditional Miwok territory and now lives in the Anacostia Watershed, in traditional Piscataway territory. She holds an MFA in poetry from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.