“Like the mystery bruise of the title poem, these memento mori are livid imprints left behind by collisions with life, tattooed reminders of emotional confrontations. But Terry Wolverton is a survivor of her deep passions. Her heart beats on despite its contusions and pulses underneath the corpus of her experience like a wellspring of life under the painful intimations of mortality. This is a remarkable body of work.” ―Michael Lassell, author of A Flame for the Touch That Matters “Terry Wolverton’s passionate achievement crackles with unsparing revelations from the dark side of the American Dream―epidemics, urban unrest, and a girlhood which might have been conjured in the imagination of Norman Rockwell’s diabolical twin. Into this end-of-the-century landscape, peopled by casualties, survivors, and warriors, she direcfts the manifold redeeming powers of poetry: to bear witness, to exorcise, to shore up―and hold fast among us―memories of those lost.”