This eclectic selection of poems straddle decades, generations and continents and constitute the stories collected by the author over a lifetime. The works reflect on the human condition, what the oral historian Studs Terkel called "life and its uncertainties," love's exuberance and sad needs, birth's joy and death's dark wounds, the comedy of communal days and the wearying tears of isolating night. Its language seeks to plummet the power of the communicated word, the fragility of understanding, and the frustrations of muteness.