Dedicated to the late Stephen Jay Gould and his book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, the collection is about the range of extraordinary life forms resulting from life's ups and downs.  Cultures forge deeply symbolic connections with such life forms. The ubiquity of the sustaining fish and the anticipatory sounds of the cicada are held in special regard. Greek poets like Virgil wrote of the “shrill-voiced” cicadas which, in the Iliad, are the old men above the tower of the seized city speaking in tones of comfort to the abducted Helen of Troy. The regenerative cycle of the cicada as spiritual transformation appears in a Chinese poem about the benevolent Qi Queen reborn as a cicada. Renewal is a recurring theme associated with the fish. To the maritime Phoenicians it represented fertility and in Christianity the provision of divine abundance in the loaves and fishes miracle of Jesus feeding 5,000. In Chinese symbolism, the fish embodies the flow of prosperity and the unbroken bonds of life.