Debra Bruce writes about people holding tighter to what hasn't been stripped away. In the first poem, a woman tells her husband about her dangerous happiness as she survives another spring since breast cancer, taking pleasure in the season and in the renewal of their sexual intimacy. A sonnet sequence chronicles the exuberant and desperate efforts of a couple to conceive a child. An aging father considers the uncertain survival of a hundred-year old oak broken by a storm -- the damage done, what wind will do.These poems never stop trying to reconcile the unreliability of our lives with the certainty of what makes them worth living. Marriage, children, connection to other people, and ordinary pleasures become the heaviest counterweights we can offer.