These poems reveal the heart of a survivor. In the title section, the poet, caught in 'the unspoken language of pain,' escapes his beginnings only to find that the culture of violence has followed him. In the second section, 'Meditations on Breath,' he charts his journey to survival. In the last section, 'Walking into My Mind,"" he contrasts the backbreaking manual labor of his day job with his real work, 'to write/Love/Hold my children while rocking them to sleep/Children of the flesh/Children of the word'. V.B. Price has written of Yurcic's work, 'Anyone who has been saved by writing...will feel a heartening kinship with these startlingly honest and beautiful poems'.