The poems in this collection are in search of. They are digging through the debris of memory, of memory blurred by trauma or degraded by time or worn thin from retrieval, from repeated examination—an ongoing attempt to apprehend. They are poems of internalized violence, addiction, domestic upheaval, sexual abuse, assault, abandonment, separation. They are also poems of adoption, of the overlap between stories, of roots and more roots, of tangled histories, of the point of rupture being the point of origination. As such, they are unsure of how to proceed, how to present themselves: they are self-conscious poems, anxious to communicate yet at times unable to break free of their own spiraling repetitions: the ritualized performance of pain as both an attempt to speak back to suffering as well as unintended proliferation of such. Compulsion. Depression. Suicidal ideation. Of course what we are talking about is the longevity of grief, its many mutations. How we learn to recognize it for what it is. What we can do with it.

This collection of poems explores memory, trauma, personal relationships, and the natural world. It is a study of the themes that arise from experience and the patterns of language that living creates within an individual. Particular attention to sound, syntax (conveying physical experience and recall), and pacing (representative of natural and biological rhythms) are central to this collection.