"How close can a person come to home when their family has deserted it? Guided by this question, the poems in Novice, a debut collection from Nida Sophasarun, traverse natural, animal, and dream worlds, seeking intimacy in a snake coming in from the rain, a mother's body imagined as a house, and the moon serving as both the missing piece and the linchpin in a night sky. Organized by tropical seasons and unfolding in East Asia and the American South, the poems in Novice propose that home is monumental and ruined, remembered and forgotten, local and diffuse, peopled and haunted"--