A series of poems about ordinary women piecing together their own significance.

 Kathleen Flenniken's poems have appeared in Poetry, Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner. She was named Washington State Poet Laureate in 2012. Coeditor and president of Floating Bridge Press, a publisher of Washington State poets, Flenniken has taught poetry through Writers in the Schools and other arts agencies. Visit Kathleen Flenniken's website for more information.

ix Acknowledgments

i Minor Characters
3 The League of Minor Characters
4 It's Not You, It's Me
5 The International House of Pancakes
6 lost coat, pls call
8 The Nuns' Remains
9 Map of the Marriage Bed
10 How to Read This Story to Your Children
12 Elisabeth Reads Poetry
14 Life and Art
15 Passing for Mormon
17 No, you have the wrong number
18 What I Learn Weeding
19 Everybody Wang Chung Tonight
20 Calling Up Ghosts
21 A Middle Child is Born
23 The Physiology of Joy

ii Minor Celebrities
27 Graphology
28 The Minor Celebrities
29 Words drift down on Virgil Suarez
30 Sarah Chang plays violin
31 Pantoum for Jane Goodall
32 Edna St. Vincent Millay's Husband
33 Built Like That
34 What I Saw

35 Conversation with a Sensualist
36 Dust
37 Lessons in Trigonometry
38 Colonel Mustard Between Games
39 Sea Monster
41 Shampoo
42 Gil's Story
44 If We Could Live Here
46 The Beauty of the Curve
48 Sotto Voce

iii Fame
53 Fireball
55 Preservation
57 One Night
59 Natural History
60 The Sound of a Train
61 My father invented the calendar
62 My Mother's Biographies
63 Woman Reading
64 Murder Mystery
65 Reading Hamilton's Biography of Robert Lowell
66 Anaïs Nin on the Sales Table
68 Miss Marianne Moore Takes a Tango Lesson
69 To Ease My Mind
71 Two Dreams of Infi nity
72 An Informal Visitation
73 The New Language
74 Prayer Animals