Governor-General's Literary Award winner Paulette Jiles has brought together in this collection a selection of poems representative of her work over the last decade. Many of her poems exploring the white frozen interior of the Canadian north will be found in this volume, as well as a series of poems calling up the bar and bawdy-house days of composer Scott Joplin's ragtime - appearing here in book form for the first time. Jiles' delight is in narrative lyrically evoking the landscape through which her stories travel. In "Song to the Rising Sun", commissioned for CBC Radio, she celebrates the Arctic landscape even as pollution threatens its harsh purity.