Winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition Emelie Griffin’ s debut California Pompeii wonders what may emerge beyond precarity and attends to the beautiful salvage that outlasts loss. At once devotional and incisive, these poems reach for the contours of our entwinement with each other and with the natural world— not to declare, but to feel them. Sun-streaked and fleeting memories of place, self, and other form a mesh where narrative blurs and fragments, but seeking persists.