SARAH C. HARWELL works as a linguistic analyst teaching computers how to parse and comprehend the language of newspapers, dating websites, and NASA engineers. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her daughter.

“Sarah Coleman Harwell is our Magellan of love. She speaks with intensity, words put under the pressure of a syntax alert for sound and interior collisions of meaning. Her skill in reversing the known and the unknown, the loved and unloved, the knotted from the unknotted, have the effect of making us come into a new and devastating awareness.”—Bruce Smith