From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on two cities, Venice and Rome-each a work of art, both a monument to the past-and on how love and loss shape places and spaces. Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ-a traveler moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her, we see, anew, the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon, and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin's attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice and Rome vividly to life for the reader. The sixteenth book in the expanding, renowned ekphrasis series, Two Cities creates space for these two historic cities to become characters themselves, their relationship to the writer as real as any love affair.

What do a whatchful fly and a weight-bearing whale have in common?

A grateful saint -- a saint whose life of work and devotion to God wouldn't have been the same without the loyalty. the friendship of a lion or a blackbird, an eagle or a deer.

Other saints in these stories -- two of the liveliest are women -- deal cleverly with animals who act up: snakes in one instance, greedy geese in another.

But in each of these stories, the commonality of all living things is luminously celebrated. The ten saints, whose biographies are given in the last pages, are named on the back of this jacket.