Book excerpt: These are poems about the anxiety of what must be traded for the comfort of the flock. "Flock books" allow farmers to register and track livestock, and these poems survey the anxieties of that registry: the comfort of shelter as trade for living under the weight of threats--of removal, conformity, or one's own urge to stray. Katie Umans has an MFA from the University of Michigan, was a Ruth and Jay C. Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and received a 2010 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.