In the sequence of poems comprising Annie Guthrie’s first book, the quest for the meaning of human consciousness and its tangled subjectivity is drawn as a slow-building narrative of the mystic experience. The journey enacted is that of the self as character, who encounters insurmountable mysteries in a breaking selfhood. A dossier of contemplative exploration, THE GOOD DARK chronicles an immersive search in three acts: Unwitting, Chorus, and Body: stations through which the character must pass, and where she is accumulatively confessed, compounded and erased.