Twenty-year-old Jenilee Lane, whose dreams are as narrow as the sky is wide, doesnt imagine any good could come out of the tornado that has ripped across the Missouri farmland where she makes her home. But some inner spark compels her to take action. To rescue her elderly neighbor Eudora Gibson from the cellar in which shes been trapped. To make her way to the nearby town of Poetry, where the townspeople have begun to gather in the only building left standing. To collect from the devastated landscape fragments of life that lie strewn about in the tornados wake: letters, photographs, and mementos that might mean something to people who have lost everything.