Poetry. In the sequence of poems comprising Annie Guthrie's first book, the quest for the meaning of human consciousness and its tangled subjectivity is drawn as a slow-building narrative of the mystic experience. The journey enacted is that of the self as character, who encounters insurmountable mysteries in a breaking selfhood.

A dossier of contemplative exploration, THE GOOD DARK chronicles an immersive search in three acts: Unwitting, Chorus, and Body: stations through which the character must pass, and where she is accumulatively confessed, compounded and erased.

As Dan Beachy-Quick observes in his Foreword, "To pay accurate attention is to find yourself broken in two, or more than two. It is to be shattered by the world you seek into a self comprised of many selves, a chorus, each with its own voice: gossip, other, priest, oracle, reader, and one unnamed because she has no name....these dark, necessary lines lay tangent to each other, glance against one intensity only to err into different discovery...where the body takes 'the blame / for the deeds of the mind.'" Beachy-Quick calls THE GOOD DARK "a curious testament to the labyrinthine complexity of human rela-tion to the world and those others that fill it....There is nature, and there is God, and there is the gossip between them that the human ear eavesdrops upon...convolutions of heart to mind and mind to heart that understand love's reciprocity is a confounded, confounding form."