"Beverly Burch's elegant new collection of poetry is an astonishingly stark and honest exploration of rupture and renewal, fearlessly and joyously observed: a great blue heron "smooth as a Buick Riviera on cruise control at dawn." From the condensed, cryptic "Final Exam"poems woven through the book to compelling and mysterious narratives ("A strange woman walks down / the sidewalk, slow as a damp fuse"), page after page of How a Mirage Works demands our attention. "Even the air's a risk," Burch writes, and readers gladly take that risk, moved by and into the charged air of these powerful poems."