Published as the winner of the University of Iowa Press 2000 Iowa Poetry Prize, this collection of lyric and prose poems organized around certain of Euclid's definitions also won the Academy of American Poets' Laughlin Prize for 2000.  

Here is the book's epigraph, from Sir Thomas Brown: Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle, must conclude and limit all. Bodies, longing, the joys of light and vision, humor, loss, hope and metaphysical questions all have their parts in plays of high culture and low. How to do things with words, indeed.