The Thing Is is award-winning poet Cameron Morse's eighth collection of poems. Its lyric emphasis on object poems returns the poet to familiar stomping grounds: the flora and fauna of the American Midwest, the travails of illness and parenting, or, parenting ill. Poems in this unbroken sequence are preceded by a prelude, describing a departure from childhood home, a movement toward a home of one's own. Place is a central concern for the larger body of the work, the failures of the body, grasps for the beautiful in the midst of mundanity.