In this first collection of short stories from a highly regarded poet, a girl's body reappears in the ice where she fell 50 years earlier, a businessman watches his soul abandon him as he makes a speech, and a tourist staggers through Athens as it transforms into a vision of hell. Depicting solitary figures drawn against stark, troubling backdrops, these stories probe the theme of isolation by freezeframing each character's life just at the moment when the past breaks the surface, or when the present--like the dam of the title--collapses under its own weight.