After a Sermon on Love. (Original writing)

In these poems, I use formal verse and free verse, traditional narrative and collage techniques to explore love, death, human relationships, the past, and history. It may seem redundant to include "the past" and "history." However, for me, "the past" has more immediate personal connotations, while "history" includes a much larger social and political perspective. To be more specific, I explore how certain issues such as alienation caused by cultural isolation affect individuals and their families. The setting for these events is a fictive community somewhere in the Midwest similar to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, except the average temperature in August is three degrees lower. Finally, I hope that these poems will not only work separately but together--one poem interacting with another, not as verse narrative, though some poems work that way, but as a chronicle of emotions, of relationships, of what makes us human.