The poems in Nightjar form a triptych vision of the way humans both experience and alter the natural world as we pass through it. Straddling between subalpine vistas and the brooks and bowers of the Acadian forest, Rice engages binaries of landscape and human history, loss and gain, the seen and unseen, and direction and distance, her movement between the sublime and the intimate stirring unexpected forces that pull us toward “the empty space where the mountain has fallen.”