by Alissa Valles (Author)

Here are poems of a ruthless lyric precision, of "intelligence/ quickened/ by vulnerability." Such a vulnerability lies in the fact that, in some languages, the word for "host" and the word for "guest" have the same root, audible in this book's title. In a postmodern world, host and guest are both "permanently temporary," and therefore they must depend on each other, across countries, cultures and languages.