Jen McClanaghan's poems roam across the most intimate of terrains: love, loss, and memory. They pause over the poet's personal tragedies before turning back to the world's larger calamities, never for long letting the one escape the shadow of the other. River Legs is nostalgic for the pre-lapsarian world of two-parent households, of dogs half-asleep on the front lawn, of youth and first love. But its wistfulness is tainted by the knowledge that the world is not only fallen but even now falling. Fathers die, mothers drink themselves sick, relationships fray. Meanwhile, these poems turn to the careful order of language, not to keep the world at bay but to finally allow it in.