Three interrelated sections of poetry which explore the primary
importance of connection, between humans and with the natural world.
In the first section, the poems are wide-ranging, exploring the
acquisition of language, the ways in which the experience and distance
embedded in language darken and threaten the qualities of a childhood
spent close to the natural world. The second section consists of a
series of prose poems titled Andranik. In these poems, a child is
speaking with her grandfather who relates, in answer to her questioning,
the details of his survival during the Armenian Genocide: his escape,
the deaths of loved ones, forced marches, enslavement all punctuated by
memories of an earlier, happier boyhood. The final section contains
shorter lyric poems set mainly in New England, poems that explore the
proximity of life and death, the complicity and interdependency of the
individual in the collective, and the redemptive possibilities of
sympathy.