Self-published in March 2024 in an edition of 250, this is the third chapbook from poet and writer Gary Dale Burns and the first under his penname, August Janson. Carefully composed over the last decade, Janson's work takes readers on a poet's walk along well-worn ley lines marking the ancient, cross-cultural pollination of the fields of pagan and Christian poetic traditions. To that end, his chapbook centers on the twisted inheritances consciously or unknowingly carried within modern culture, particularly in male bodies and minds. Fathers and patriarchal figureheads abound in Janson's poems, a preoccupation with the legacy of violence bound up with masculinity and the toxic cultural miasma produced by lineages of power abuse. Included are two extended sequence poems, "Hugh Melody" and "Shadow, Canyon, and a Bridal Veil," taking readers through semi-autobiographical, geological, and metaphysical spaces and periods, where sacrificial cattle, constellations, and climate change perform a dance of death that seeks to invoke new growth amid decay. The presiding mode is elegiac, as the chapbook is dedicated to the memory of the poet's biological, adoptive, and step- fathers, but beneath this shroud of chapel mourning is a Dionysian celebration of life's mysteries and promise, with the hope that the future can order appropriate repairs of the past and leave the rest to our self-made ruins.