"Like the ancient sea charts of the book's title, Jason Sommer here marks the routes and stories of journeys we all can recognize as vaguely familiar, but in Sommer's retelling these otherwise mundane treks spark of something surprisingly rich and strange. Employing traditional lyrics, narrative verse, and more experimental forms, Sommer takes us down to the sea floor, or into a basement bursting with centuries of storage, or through the successive layers of a single consciousness. Throughout this book, the speaker in the poems questions what can and can't be known of the self and the other, of love, of what we value, and of what we insist has permanence, despite evidence to the contrary. And, like the ancient cartographers who lavished their skill upon their artworks, the book embraces the possibilities of beauty in the journey's rendering"--