At fourteen, Gardner McFall lost her Navy pilot father in the Vietnam war. His A-4 Skyhawk was never recovered from the Pacific where he was training for a second tour of duty in Vietnam. Her first poems arising from his disappearance appeared in Ploughshares in 1981; her most recent ran in The New Republic in 2013. Ms. McFall's work has been published in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, Southwest Review, The Sewanee Review, The New Yorker, The Nation, Poet Lore, and The Hopkins Review, among others. Three of the poems in this collection appear in Norton's 2018 anthology, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees, edited by Laren McClung, with a foreword by Yusef Komunyakaa.