Excisions investigates the feeling— the problem and the syntax— of being on a threshold. If you don’ t know what will happen next, you can’ t yet say what has happened. These poems arise from states of precise unknowing, desperate imagination, inchoate emotion, encounters with mortality and power when they’ re closing in but haven’ t caught you yet. What is choice, given the terms of an ill body, survival in a grotesque empire? Tenderly and acutely, these poems examine the life of before and after: when something is excised from you, it was you, and you are what remains.