Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas’s voice reaches us clearly, yet as if in a dream, in “List Poem without Prejudice:”

Once the radio sounded better in a blue Ford 

station wagon when music was amplified by tears

and several puffs from your father’s cigarette

wafted your way through clouds

long after he died.

The book’s title makes no bones what sort of a ride you’re in for, a signal reaffirmed in titles of Grellas’s individual poems like “In the Emptying of Pockets,” or “You’re Dying, Darling.” Grellas does not disappoint, in this unflinching collection singed with emotion, and bristling with small but trenchant detail.