The Abbotsford Convent becomes more than the setting of this poetry collection; it emerges as presence, intimate and familiar as well as constraining and forbidding. But, it is childhood itself that becomes the subterranean geography and pulse of this compilation as the poems explore what it means to grow up in an orphanage. Subject to the rules of lay and religious adults, the voices herein create multiple pathways through memory and time as they map and navigate the many-stranded mysteries of their institutionalized lives.