This is such a great collection of poems. The title comes from a piece about spending his birthday one year burying a cat that belonged to someone he had been dating for a few weeks. He’s struck by how natural it seems to dig into the earth and place the body and cover it with dirt.

That theme of uncanny movements and memories follows through the rest of the book. He thinks about sleeping in the car with his brother and mother after leaving their drunk father, about the security he felt playing baseball as a kid, about being in the sand with his brother at Seaside.

Just a great book about life in New Jersey.