My poetry book-in-progress depicts human and nonhuman animals at a moment of conversion from one way of life to another, more difficult one. It begins with Rilke’s notion that “the more difficult”—for him the choice to retreat often into solitude—was a prerequisite to authentic artistic creation. The more difficult life is the one in which we stay, the one we keep coming back to, the one we turn and lovingly face. While several poems study the lives of Saint Francis of Assisi, William James, Mary, and more recently John Coltrane and other contemporary artists and thinkers, others attend to nonhuman animals displaced by human interference, and even ancient conversions from land to sea. In poetry there are several echoes of the same sentiment: from Philip Levine’s dictate that artists “make it hard” for themselves, to Dante’s opening of La Vita Nuova, “In the book of my memory—the part of it before which not much is legible—there is the heading Incipit vita nova.” Here begins the new life.