The universal fascination with time-past, present, and future-is the core of widely published poet Douglas Nordfors' second collection. The Fate Motif features a wide range of angles and subjects: personal history, historical figures and famous artists such as Queen Elizabeth I, Marcel Proust, and Buster Keaton, and various modes of abstract meditation. It also features two distinct, complementary styles. Some poems have a clear narrative framework and are applauded by Patrick Loafman, editor of the new online journal The Dandelion Farm Review, for having "small hooks embedded in their language." Others invite the reader into a more challenging intellectual labyrinth. ________________ Praise for Douglas Nordfors' previous collection of poems, Auras: The observation is so exact, the language so elegant yet colloquial, the pathways taken along a world of riverbanks and forests so comprehensive, that the search for the "forever natural" here seems natural indeed. This is a book about searching for love, for literary truths, for knowledge, even though that "knowing can't be owned." And in the end we are gifted with insights and revelations from a poet so immersed in his art that he has become the "carving removed from the wood." -Tom O'Grady Author of The Farmville Elegies, In the Room of the Just Born, and longtime editor of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review These poems offer profound empathy with children, natural phenomena, and animal presences; they marry the pre-Lapsarian, primal, urgency of early experiences with an extraordinarily generous adult vision that compels and taunts us with the depth of its cultural, literary, historic, and personal intensity. Attentive to minute, intuitive particulars, the poems are also capable of a vision of the world that is expansive, joyful, and indicting. I am grateful for the acumen, shadowed humor, deft craft, and utter, inimitable ultra-humanity of these poems. -Lisa Russ Spaar Author of Blue Venus, Satin Cash, and Vanitas, Rough