In this, David Citino's eighth full-length collection, a poet approaches the end of the twentieth century takes stock of a single life: of its family and culture, history, and beliefs; of the contemporary forces of nature, science, politics, gender, and myth that shape and misshape it; of the land - and even the body - it calls home. These are poems that take a hard look at the experience of one individual, but always in terms of place and context, and other lives. Employing "broken symmetry" - a term from high energy physics for a state in which traces of an earlier symmetry can be found - as a description of the contemporary fractured world and his own fitfully declining health, Citino seeks to know whether an unbroken symmetry ever existed, or whether it is human nature to believe fervently in some lost golden age.