The Scare in the Crow races across the back roads like a muscle car making a beer run. Then it pauses, in haunting contemplation of a walk through the woods. Armstrong's poems inhabit the fantasia of this world â in the peculiarities of taxidermy, crowds watching a house wash away in a spring flood, old tombstones cast over a riverbank, or rumours of a sighting of the extinct eastern panther. Gothic shadows of dead friends and strangers inhabit the lost cause of failing farms and industries, eroding communities, children dispersed, the names of distant cousins slipping through loose fingers.

With blistering wit, Armstrong invites us to laugh at the zaniness of life. From moments of melancholy emerges an unflinching gaze at people who cling to life and livelihood the only way they know how. And always, she senses the pulse of the natural world â beautiful, transformative, and populated with the perceptions of animal minds.