<div>An Ivorybill in Arkansas, which human guilt has conjured up from extinction; mud daubers toting ?stunned spiders” to their nests on a screened porch in Louisiana; a whale shark off the Yucatan whose spots tell its story in indecipherable Braille; conchs harvested from an undersea garden in the Caymans; stray dogs in Athens, ancient gods in disguise?the lives of these creatures and others entwine with ours in <I>The Garden of the Fugitives</I>.<BR><br> Loosely based on the story of Eve, this collection of poems takes the reader from Eden into a fallen world. Exploring the tense relationships between women and men, mothers and daughters, and human beings and other species, these poems lead to Pompeii’s memorial to the ?ash people” in <I>The Garden of the Fugitives</I>, where parents and children, inside their husks of plaster, never stop dying to the singing of bees.<BR><br> WISTERIA<BR> Oozing perfume,<BR> the vine kills exquisitely<BR> in such high style.<BR><br> The trees have no idea<BR> what’s happening to them.<BR></div>