Water East of the Fall Line

This collection of original poems alters the common objects of life, such as trees, rivers, and food, to make them uncommon through the senses yet familiar in language. The sequence of painting poems communicates the idea of liquidity by exploring the work of French Impressionism. Another sequence seeks out the intimate, solemn, and even traumatic experiences associated with rivers, such as "Ohio," which recalls a "day the volunteers got bussed down by Red Cross for flood clean-up." The metaphor of the collection is water, the constant flux and evolution of one's impressions throughout a lifetime. Setting the poems in natural surroundings, the poems perceive the family: the narrator witnesses his estranged brother raking leaves, or elegizes his grandfather by associating him with the green peppers he once gardened. Above all, these poems take the position that nothing in the world is common, because a person's impressions and experiences consequently make things completely original.