Any event can be a vigil: a walk by a river, a flu shot at Walgreens, an hour spent by a bird feeder attracting mostly cardinals. A vigil means you are keeping watch, and these poems are watching the world around them—and the worlds beneath those worlds, too. The poems in this collection pull from dreams and apparitions as much as they do reality: a woman in a house, a coffee mug, a book of matches, a load of unfolded laundry, a goldfish won at a county fair. All is fair game. Bonfires & Other Vigils celebrates the watching in unconventional ways. Readers can expect to revel in the elusive wonder of haziness, otherworldliness, and wildness of examining life through lenses of vigilant dreaming.