Rebecca Reynolds’ first book, Daughter of the Hangnail, was selected for the 1998 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. In her second volume, Reynolds is bent on exploring interior interchanges between sound and sense: the seductions of language, the fund of sensual experience, informal feeling versus the logic of the world, and the desire for the imaginary as opposed to a reliance on public truths, to that which occurs within the “census-drawn depths.” InThe Bovine Two-Step, Reynolds tests delineations between the interior and exterior worlds, between self and world. The poems address these distinctions, often wrestling with the blur that results from their mingling. Revelations in these poems are small and quiet and open to questioning—and that is our human business.