What do you think?
Rate this book
Ledger: Poems
A book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning from the internationally renowned poet named "among the modern masters" (The Washington Post).
Ledger's pages hold the most important and masterly work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance ("Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw"), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider "the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap," recognize the intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty. Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion, has created a book of indispensable poems, tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate.
Ledger's pages hold the most important and masterly work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance ("Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw"), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider "the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap," recognize the intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty. Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion, has created a book of indispensable poems, tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published March 10, 2020
166 people are currently reading
1,361 people want to read
About the author
Jane Hirshfield
64books603followersJane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including the forthcoming Ledger (Knopf, March 2020), The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), longlisted for the National Book Award, Come Thief (Knopf, August 23, 2011), After (HarperCollins, 2006), which was named a “Best Book of 2006� by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times and shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award); as well as two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. She has also edited and co-translated three books collecting the work of women poets from the distant past, and one e-book on Basho and the development of haiku, The Heart of Haiku. Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 40th Annual Distinguished Achievement Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, an honor previously received by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. Her work has been featured in ten editions of The Best American Poems and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement/TLS, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, Orion, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Hirshfield’s poems have also been featured many times on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac as well as two Bill Moyers� PBS television specials. She has presented her poems and taught at festivals and universities throughout the U.S., in China, Japan, the Middle East, the U.K., Poland, and Ireland. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Hirshfield's appearance schedule can be found at:
Hirshfield's appearance schedule can be found at:
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
March 20, 2020
With poems smooth and succinct, Ledger is a tender tap on the shoulder, a voice that says “look at this� and “look at that.� Ledger catalogs losses, hidden gains, surprises, rhythms of an aging spirit—found in streams, trees, floorboards, buckets, pockets and birds.
March 21, 2020
Moving, evocative poems of the world, minutely observed. I especially liked the ones that grieve for the environment, express frustration at injustice, and question our existence.
This one, called My Debt:
...
Forgive,
spine-covered leaf, soft-bodied spider,
octopus lifting
one curious tentacle back toward the hand of the diver
that in such black ink
I set down your flammable colors.
-- Jane Hirshfield
This one, called My Debt:
...
Forgive,
spine-covered leaf, soft-bodied spider,
octopus lifting
one curious tentacle back toward the hand of the diver
that in such black ink
I set down your flammable colors.
-- Jane Hirshfield
October 8, 2021
I just heard another writer say this week that people don't read poetry books from beginning to end; they just jump around in them. Well, that's just not true! And Jane Hirshfield's books are one of the best cases in point. Her books, and particularly this one, are carefully constructed, and go from one place to another. The reader grows and changes as he moves through the book.
Yes, Hirshfield has gone higher and higher in my pantheon of contemporary poets over the last decade. She is able to assume the prophetic mantle without effort; I doubt if she even thinks about it. At times she can sound like a gentle Old Testament prophet. This book begins with a poem that is already becoming kind of famous:
Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say; they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
She moves on through visions of the world, troubling visions. She responds to the wars and the perversion of language that allows for wars. She writes poems that are clearly informed by her Buddhist practice. She has poems of exquisite observation, like she has had for all of her writing life. She has poems of obvious metaphor that sound something like wisdom literature. Like "Snow":
Little soul,
for you, too,
death is coming.
Was there something
you thought
you needed to do?
Snow
does not walk into a room
and wonder
why.
And then, perhaps best of all, there are the poems that feel like metaphors, but they are metaphors that are deeply mysterious. Hirshfield leaves us with that sense that the world is bigger that we can ever understand. And she does it with incredibly few words, just a few brushstrokes, that often seem considered for a very long time.
Yes, Hirshfield has gone higher and higher in my pantheon of contemporary poets over the last decade. She is able to assume the prophetic mantle without effort; I doubt if she even thinks about it. At times she can sound like a gentle Old Testament prophet. This book begins with a poem that is already becoming kind of famous:
Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say; they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
She moves on through visions of the world, troubling visions. She responds to the wars and the perversion of language that allows for wars. She writes poems that are clearly informed by her Buddhist practice. She has poems of exquisite observation, like she has had for all of her writing life. She has poems of obvious metaphor that sound something like wisdom literature. Like "Snow":
Little soul,
for you, too,
death is coming.
Was there something
you thought
you needed to do?
Snow
does not walk into a room
and wonder
why.
And then, perhaps best of all, there are the poems that feel like metaphors, but they are metaphors that are deeply mysterious. Hirshfield leaves us with that sense that the world is bigger that we can ever understand. And she does it with incredibly few words, just a few brushstrokes, that often seem considered for a very long time.
December 29, 2023
i Love Jane Hirshfield so very much. just. soooo very much. i hope to be more articulate in a future time that is not now about how GOOD her poems are, but in the meantime: JANE HIRSHFIELD I LOVE YOUUUUUUU
April 8, 2025
Reading for poetry book club through Napa's Book Mine bookstore. Not one of my favorite volumes.
September 15, 2022
stunning. magical.
though it is not words that turn you,
chlorophyll sorrow,
do not abandon here your faithless servants
though it is not words that turn you,
chlorophyll sorrow,
do not abandon here your faithless servants
January 16, 2021
There were a few poems that really struck me in this collection, but many that did not. I've liked several of Hirschfield's short, quippy poems - the ones that deviated from this form were unfamiliar and harder to connect to.
O Snail, wrote Issa, climb Fuji slowly, slowly.
Hirschfield at her best in O Snail! <3
Brain feeling scattered. Need to take better notes as I read.
O Snail, wrote Issa, climb Fuji slowly, slowly.
Hirschfield at her best in O Snail! <3
Brain feeling scattered. Need to take better notes as I read.
March 22, 2022
deep and delicate and pulled beautifully on my my emotions and thoughts.
February 11, 2020
This is the kind of poetry I most like. Short, full of images that build to a final line that makes you think, ‘Wow. How come I never noticed that before?�
June 3, 2020
The kind of poetry I really don’t like. Cryptic yet banal when decoded. Only read about 10 then flipped through the others.
November 29, 2020
Not up to her older stuff (or certainly her essays on poetry), but maybe her reputation sets the bar too high.
June 7, 2021
[3.5]
my 2 brain cells: found dead in a ditch
pretty words tho hehe<3
my 2 brain cells: found dead in a ditch
pretty words tho hehe<3
September 17, 2020
“A writer’s capital is language, which, it seems, is as slippery as any other kind of wealth, as potentially cursed if held without nuance, as transient, as bluntly and inextricably subjective. A briefly borrowed inheritance; a street-found penny.�
January 25, 2025
enough old white women comparing vague crises of refugees/race/ethnicity/climate to their birdfeeders please 🙏🏼 “breathes in the scent� and “a ream of paper� are delightful poems though
read on two flights, london �> bos & bos �> london
read on two flights, london �> bos & bos �> london
May 21, 2021
Some of these glimmer.
Read
July 14, 2022Hadn't read her before but will definitely look for older collections.
March 17, 2025
Jane Hirshfield is the kind of poet who reminds you how good poetry is and can be.
May 10, 2023
Hirshfield is up there with Mary Oliver in the dope white lady poet crew.
August 9, 2021
Jane Hirshfield's poems on life, love, loss, the environment, and the brilliance of the everyday. I found this collection soothing and at times surprising in its honesty.
April 7, 2022
Dead of winter under blankets or mid summer sweltering in shade read
Read
October 11, 2020Some a little mundane, which I can’t decide is a comment on the poems themselves or just that I’ve been reading a lot of poetry from people who don’t think like I do. i.e., hirshfield is a white American scientific-thinking female, so of course we will think along the same lines, so the poems would be simpler-feeling and relatable. On the other hand, I could simply be being pretentious and thinking that poems about noisy apartment neighbors are boring and not “””deep”””� enough. Whatever. I’m still working on my poetry literacy.
Particular poems/lines I liked:
Let Them Not Say
Day Beginning With Seeing The ISS... “If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief of what hasn’t changed yet.�
Today, Another Universe “Today, for some, a universe with vanish. First noisily, then just another silence.�
In Ulvik
Nine Pebbles “This body, still walking. The wind must go around it.�
Amor Fati
Ledger “For the exiled, home can be translated “then�, translated “scar”�
Ghazal For The End Of Time
Particular poems/lines I liked:
Let Them Not Say
Day Beginning With Seeing The ISS... “If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief of what hasn’t changed yet.�
Today, Another Universe “Today, for some, a universe with vanish. First noisily, then just another silence.�
In Ulvik
Nine Pebbles “This body, still walking. The wind must go around it.�
Amor Fati
Ledger “For the exiled, home can be translated “then�, translated “scar”�
Ghazal For The End Of Time
April 13, 2020
A timely and careful collection of lyric entreaties to change direction for the sake of humanity and ecology. Some of my favorite moments:
Evolution might have turned left at the corner and gone down another street entirely.
Closing eyes to taste better the char of ordinary sweetness.
Sometimes the feet’s direction is only away.
The day was a dark-eyed giraffe, its unfathomable legs kept walking.
The fed consider the hungry and stay silent.
Incapable of betrayal: a tree. Incapable of holding a secret: a stone.
As a bird is caught in its birdness before it is caught in the bird net.
Most of us hungry at daybreak, sleepy by dark. Some slept, one eye open, in water.
On the fifth day the scientists who studied the rivers were forbidden to speak or to study the rivers.
Evolution might have turned left at the corner and gone down another street entirely.
Closing eyes to taste better the char of ordinary sweetness.
Sometimes the feet’s direction is only away.
The day was a dark-eyed giraffe, its unfathomable legs kept walking.
The fed consider the hungry and stay silent.
Incapable of betrayal: a tree. Incapable of holding a secret: a stone.
As a bird is caught in its birdness before it is caught in the bird net.
Most of us hungry at daybreak, sleepy by dark. Some slept, one eye open, in water.
On the fifth day the scientists who studied the rivers were forbidden to speak or to study the rivers.
May 25, 2021
I
liked these poems.
They left me with
an eggplant of questions,
and the blank-faced answer of snow.
A mopus for your thoughts.
*poems of note:
You Go to Sleep in One Room and Wake in Another
Chance Darkened Me
Branch
Like Others
They Have Decided
Snow
liked these poems.
They left me with
an eggplant of questions,
and the blank-faced answer of snow.
A mopus for your thoughts.
*poems of note:
You Go to Sleep in One Room and Wake in Another
Chance Darkened Me
Branch
Like Others
They Have Decided
Snow
June 24, 2023
Astounding poems that are easy to digest. Highly recommend.
December 11, 2023
3.5 stars. many of the poems deal with issues such as war or the climate crisis, and especially the poet's ambivalent role as a bystander. oftentimes, this is achieved by swerving from a scene of natural beauty or domestic ease into something darker. for example, the poem "Homs", which goes from:
White pelicans, which do not resemble the spirit,
write their single sentence
straight through it, unhindered.
Their rowing wings dipped long ago into some inkpot.
to a description of a desolated "no-longer city" shot on a Russian drone, concluding that:
No fish-teeming world nor its spiralling wings can redeem this.
(No feather, shell, word, image redeem this.)
we see this technique also in "Day Beginning With Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon Over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes" and "Practice", where a woman doing pushups counts instead of numbers "the names of incomprehension: Sanford, Ferguson, Charleston. Aleppo, Sarajevo, Nagasaki." and finds that at the end she has grown no stronger.
these poems, especially the ones about the environment (see "Today, Another Universe") are the most compelling ones in the book. a lot of them are found in the first half of the collection, which for that reason i found stronger than the second.
hirshfield's ambivalence towards her ability and usefulness in bearing witness is part of a larger sense of self-deprecation in the collection. multiple poems deal with, essentially, human hubris. humans have such narrow understanding, often limited to just ourselves, and yet we think we are the centre of the world! we impose our meanings on the world, and think it's the other way around!... is what i got out of the book. lines like these abound:
from "Cold, Clear":
Stars, wind, day, might, pine bark.
They don't need us.
They don't need to be stars, wind, day, night, pine bark.
and from "Falcon":
How close to human
must the breathed-in air come
before it develops a sense of shame or humour?
and from "Branch":
A clock does not have hands, a face,
tell anything, rightly or wrongly, least of all time.
An empty branch does not long for its nondescript bird.
The bird is not the quick dash
that holds separate the world's Yes from the world's No.
i thought that the book could probably be trimmed, since there were a few moments that came off... smartier than what the content warranted. like, i'm not fully sold on lines like "a bird is caught in its birdness before it is caught in the bird net" or the poem "My Silence" which is, of course, a blank page. in general, the more ~ metaphysical ~ poems in the second half, such as the "Little Soul" sequence, kinda fell flat for me.
in general, however, the language is interesting and enjoyable while not making the poems too inaccessible. a decent read
—Ĕ�
Now A Darkness is Coming
I hold my life with two hands.
I walk with two legs.
Two ears are enough to hear Bach with.
Blinded in one eye, a person sees with the other.
Now a great darkness is coming.
A both-eyes darkness.
I have one mouth.
It holds two words.
Yes, No,
inside all others.
Yes. No. No. Yes.
I say yes to these words, as I must,
and I also refuse them.
My two legs,
shaped to go forward,
obedient to can't-know and must-be,
walk into the time that is coming.
White pelicans, which do not resemble the spirit,
write their single sentence
straight through it, unhindered.
Their rowing wings dipped long ago into some inkpot.
to a description of a desolated "no-longer city" shot on a Russian drone, concluding that:
No fish-teeming world nor its spiralling wings can redeem this.
(No feather, shell, word, image redeem this.)
we see this technique also in "Day Beginning With Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon Over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes" and "Practice", where a woman doing pushups counts instead of numbers "the names of incomprehension: Sanford, Ferguson, Charleston. Aleppo, Sarajevo, Nagasaki." and finds that at the end she has grown no stronger.
these poems, especially the ones about the environment (see "Today, Another Universe") are the most compelling ones in the book. a lot of them are found in the first half of the collection, which for that reason i found stronger than the second.
hirshfield's ambivalence towards her ability and usefulness in bearing witness is part of a larger sense of self-deprecation in the collection. multiple poems deal with, essentially, human hubris. humans have such narrow understanding, often limited to just ourselves, and yet we think we are the centre of the world! we impose our meanings on the world, and think it's the other way around!... is what i got out of the book. lines like these abound:
from "Cold, Clear":
Stars, wind, day, might, pine bark.
They don't need us.
They don't need to be stars, wind, day, night, pine bark.
and from "Falcon":
How close to human
must the breathed-in air come
before it develops a sense of shame or humour?
and from "Branch":
A clock does not have hands, a face,
tell anything, rightly or wrongly, least of all time.
An empty branch does not long for its nondescript bird.
The bird is not the quick dash
that holds separate the world's Yes from the world's No.
i thought that the book could probably be trimmed, since there were a few moments that came off... smartier than what the content warranted. like, i'm not fully sold on lines like "a bird is caught in its birdness before it is caught in the bird net" or the poem "My Silence" which is, of course, a blank page. in general, the more ~ metaphysical ~ poems in the second half, such as the "Little Soul" sequence, kinda fell flat for me.
in general, however, the language is interesting and enjoyable while not making the poems too inaccessible. a decent read
—Ĕ�
Now A Darkness is Coming
I hold my life with two hands.
I walk with two legs.
Two ears are enough to hear Bach with.
Blinded in one eye, a person sees with the other.
Now a great darkness is coming.
A both-eyes darkness.
I have one mouth.
It holds two words.
Yes, No,
inside all others.
Yes. No. No. Yes.
I say yes to these words, as I must,
and I also refuse them.
My two legs,
shaped to go forward,
obedient to can't-know and must-be,
walk into the time that is coming.
December 28, 2024
Not my favorite, but there were a few poems I liked. I REALLY liked the First Draft interview with Jane Hirshfield, though, and it was nice reading the poems she talked about in the podcast (especially "In Ulvik". That might be my favorite). Her favorite subjects in this collection seem to be life (animal and human), nature, the end of the world, and the climate crisis.
For me, Hirshfield's poems either feel much too simple or much too complicated. I don't like to read things like "A woman speaks to me/ of a paw-paw tree.// I have never seen a paw-paw tree./ I have never eaten its fruit.// I nod./ The conversation continues." It can feel like the lines are short to force them to sound deep, even though they're not saying much. And then there are poems so vague or clumsy or complicated that I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from them. There were a few stars - "Ledger", for one, which rhymes slightly and was delightful because of it. And "Amor Fati" I loved.
Hearing Hirshfield read her poems on the podcast was helpful - they're read very slowly and you get more of a sense of the FEELING of each one. And to be fair to this collection, I was skimming a lot. (Which is okay. One does not have to read a poetry book straight through.) I'm going to keep the book and maybe return to it in a few years to see if I feel the same way. Or I might never read it again haha, but I'm glad I tried it once!
For me, Hirshfield's poems either feel much too simple or much too complicated. I don't like to read things like "A woman speaks to me/ of a paw-paw tree.// I have never seen a paw-paw tree./ I have never eaten its fruit.// I nod./ The conversation continues." It can feel like the lines are short to force them to sound deep, even though they're not saying much. And then there are poems so vague or clumsy or complicated that I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from them. There were a few stars - "Ledger", for one, which rhymes slightly and was delightful because of it. And "Amor Fati" I loved.
Hearing Hirshfield read her poems on the podcast was helpful - they're read very slowly and you get more of a sense of the FEELING of each one. And to be fair to this collection, I was skimming a lot. (Which is okay. One does not have to read a poetry book straight through.) I'm going to keep the book and maybe return to it in a few years to see if I feel the same way. Or I might never read it again haha, but I'm glad I tried it once!
November 7, 2021
This is a collection of poems that I just wasn’t wowed by. I personally think poetry is super subjective, and so while I was lukewarm about most of this collection myself, I don’t think it’s therefore “bad.� Hirshfield’s poems in Ledger feel high quality, they feel expensive…sort of the way the sheets in a 5 star hotel feel. She’s experienced and obviously lives words and imagery. She’s also obviously processing some big shit- climate change and mass extinction. But for me, I could admire the quality while yet not being seized by them. I guess sort of the way I might feel those 5 star sheets, and even though they’re crisp and thick and clearly excellent sheets, to me they don’t feel comfortable, so I don’t wish I had them at home.
There’s also a bit of Mary Oliver influence, so that’s always a trigger for me, ever since I read Oliver’s essay about digging up turtle eggs and eating them “just to see what they taste like.� I know that I am alone among white women of a certain age in disliking Mary Oliver, but now you know why I dislike her and now you know that I dislike her, so you will understand why an Oliver influence is not a good thing in my experience.
Anyhoo, if you like Oliver a lot or if you crave very vague, oblique meditations on loss, extinction, and climate change, this may very well be just what you’re looking for. For me, not so much.
There’s also a bit of Mary Oliver influence, so that’s always a trigger for me, ever since I read Oliver’s essay about digging up turtle eggs and eating them “just to see what they taste like.� I know that I am alone among white women of a certain age in disliking Mary Oliver, but now you know why I dislike her and now you know that I dislike her, so you will understand why an Oliver influence is not a good thing in my experience.
Anyhoo, if you like Oliver a lot or if you crave very vague, oblique meditations on loss, extinction, and climate change, this may very well be just what you’re looking for. For me, not so much.
April 17, 2021
Some really lovely poems that speak to this strange moment (2020) with simplicity combined with mystery. Curiosity about everything on earth abounds. The succinct and suggestive flavor of Japanese poetry and the koan-ic form of Buddhism mean that mystery remains elusive, but lingers in the mind.
Notebook
A Venus flytrap can count to five.
Crows and bees recognize faces.
Mice suffer when seeing a mouse who is known to them suffer.
Trees warn one another to alter their sap as beetles draw near.
Our one remaining human distinction
a pre-Copernican pride in our human distinction.
"Arthritis in both ankles!"
Neruda wrote in a notebook,
January 3. 1959, on a boat leaving Valparaiso for Venezuela,
limping like an old racehorse, then starting his poem.
Notebook
A Venus flytrap can count to five.
Crows and bees recognize faces.
Mice suffer when seeing a mouse who is known to them suffer.
Trees warn one another to alter their sap as beetles draw near.
Our one remaining human distinction
a pre-Copernican pride in our human distinction.
"Arthritis in both ankles!"
Neruda wrote in a notebook,
January 3. 1959, on a boat leaving Valparaiso for Venezuela,
limping like an old racehorse, then starting his poem.
July 22, 2021
"I entered the debt that is owed to the real. // Forgive, / spine-covered leaf, soft-bodied spider, / octopus lifting / one curious tentacle back toward the hand of the diver / that in such black ink / I set down your flammable colors." ("The Debt")
"Let them say we warmed ourselves by it, / read by its light, praised, / and it burned." ("Let Them Not Say")
"As for the humans. / Let us not speak of the humans. / Let us speak of their language. // The first-person singular / condemns the second-person plural / for betrayals neither has words left to name. // The fed consider the hungry / and stay silent." ("Cataclysm")
"Let them say we warmed ourselves by it, / read by its light, praised, / and it burned." ("Let Them Not Say")
"As for the humans. / Let us not speak of the humans. / Let us speak of their language. // The first-person singular / condemns the second-person plural / for betrayals neither has words left to name. // The fed consider the hungry / and stay silent." ("Cataclysm")
October 10, 2020
This is brilliant collection. Although I'm familiar with Hirshfield's work this collection knocked me sideways with its range. My beautiful (thank you library!!!) new copy bristled with the pieces of paper I used to mark pages of poems I needed to re-read (and share). The # series which all began "Little soul," was especially strong for me. The sparser the poem, the more I'm amazed. From "Kitchen," "Yet a life is not prepared for its ending
like a sliced eggplant,
salted and pressed to let leave from itself what is bitter."
like a sliced eggplant,
salted and pressed to let leave from itself what is bitter."
Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.