Brandon Shimoda is the author of The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019) and The Desert (The Song Cave, 2018), among other books going back, all the way back, to his first books: a spiral-bound book of faces in colored pencil (1980s) and a book of scratch-and-sniff stickers (also 1980s). The Hour of the Rat meanwhile, is a series of poems that were written during the first months of his daughter's life, and is dedicated to her.