"Debut collection of verse. --Full disclosure: I knew Delta Eddy when she was Gary. The dedicatee of her elegy "Student," Anthony Piccione (d. 2001), who is a central presence in Sparks, was an English Department colleague and close friend of mine. Delta writes, "I keep / walking toward my teacher's home. He's moved deeper into the woods, his poems crows / flying silent among bare trees." And by way of this book, it's as though Tony-I believe I can speak for him-and I are now in turn walking into our student's house where we are feeling Emerson's "perpetual revelation" by way of startling observation, concentrated voice, earned statements and leaps. But more: by way of Eddy's imaginative power toward primal intelligence that questions everything but hopes, in the end, in part by way of poetry, to be of spiritual use, even as we "Dispose of [her] ashes thus: / Everybody gets a cupful to spill / in their doorways on their icy steps" ... Cosmic sparks to earthly flames to ashes, this breakthrough book will keep giving of itself to us, merging with us, as its strong and surprising and riveting poems keep realizing that "there is no soul / in birds or grass or me that is a separate thing." William Heyen, National Book Award Finalist, author of Nature: Selected & New Poems 1970-2020"--