b o y is an extended lyric poem/essay that uses repetition, fragment, and syntax to continually build a form that continually falls apart. The poem is both a meditation and an investigation into loss, and into the relationship of loss to identity, with making a poem, and with holding on to something. What does mourning look like and how does it change as it accrues? How is mourning inherited? This work does not claim release; it reenvisions or argues against narratives that insist that the end of great loss is to "let go," "set free" or "rest."

The poems that comprise Murmuration are an act of vigilance in the face of loss. At certain moments in the distorted timeline of grief one searches the remaining world around them for signs of the beloved, signs that they are not simply gone but instead transformed or dispersed into another way of being. In this looking one's relationship to the external world undergoes a radical transformation of its own and demands a sustained attention from the bereaved that often draws from, but ultimately outruns cataloguing acts of memory. These poems attempt to render the movements of that attention as it learns to track a body made formless. These are moments of a consciousness dispersed in language as it follows the undulations, ambiguities, absences, presences, and transformations of form after death. Here, the speaker of these poems listens and watches for the languages of the transformed in whatever form they take; an attempt to listen to the murmur and eventually to learn to murmur back.

This collection represents work produced between September 2015 and April 2017. A phantom limb is characterized not by what is absent but by the wound that created its loss--the haunting of a pain, and the confusion caused by its non-presence. These poems shift and shutter around their phantom limbs, tracking the wounds split open by grief, the physicality of time’s passing, and the mind’s inability to reconcile its own impermanence. The poems hope to resist the lyric while simultaneously imploding form, confronting the mind’s relationship with the natural and digital worlds it inhabits and is informed by. Celestial bodies and human bodies share a panic of impermanence here––time is as unknowable but also as physical as star stuff. In their disfluencies and insistences grappling toward some kind of "feeling," these poems investigate what it means to live and survive a life characterized by loss in its various shapes and forms.