You've got to love a poet who says:

            All the hermits and holy men
            of my formative youth
            were alcoholic sheepherders
            in self-imposed exile

It's all here: dining on mountain oysters; jacketing orphan lambs with the bloody hides of the recently dead to encourage adoption; waking in an artist mother's studio surrounded by paintings; grieving the loss of the ranch.

"Places are the storehouse of events," the poet tells us. In these hard and loving poems of growing up in a family of Wyoming sheep ranchers, Maureen Tolman Flannery shows us she is well versed in the storehouse that is the American West.
            - Charles Rossiter, host of poetrypoetry.com