Melissa Boston's Edna is an inventive exploration of the pastoral mode that pulls from different sources of art and literature to construct a narrative about connection and wanting, love and failure, as well as acceptance. With three distinct speakers, the collection begins with an invoking of the title's only named speaker, and the reader is taken on an odyssey of a failed relationship that spans from the Hawaiian Islands to the Midwest. But with a lyrical tenderness, beauty is found in the ruins of these intimate moments, and the conversations that art and literature have with our lives is continued in a new paradigm of our interpreting and understanding of moments and places we inhabit.