This collection includes Celestial Navigations. Set in Castine, Maine, this sequence of poems draws on the Tablet of the Holy Mariner, a mystical work by Bahá'uálláh, in its meditations on an unravelling age .

Sandra Hutchison has received a number of literary awards and prizes, among them an Emily Dickinson Poetry Prize from Universities West Press. Her poetry, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Oxford anthology of stories about China, Chinese Ink, Western Pen (Oxford University Press, 2000). She is the author of Chinese Brushstrokes (Turnstone Press, Winnipeg, 1996), a book of stories about life in China in the prelude to and aftermath of the Tiananmen incident. She lives with her husband, her daughter, and their six cats in Orono, a village in Maine, where she teaches English Literature and Creative Writing and serves as the poetry editor for Puckerbrush Review, a Maine literary journal. The Art of Nesting is her first published collection of poems.