Sally Van Doren's Promise features a series of short lyric poems, contemplative vignettes of daily life that examine friendship, marriage, and family with a veneer of playfulness. These poems take us into a space where a year is compressed into minutes and a small trickle of memory floods the mind. Van Doren, a visual artist as well as a poet, composes word collages that help us to touch the promise underneath the surface and to make sense of the senseless.