What it Means

These poems explore what it means to be awake, aware and vulnerable during moments of spiritual emptiness. On these pages, seemingly polar worlds merge and collide: reality and dream, sorrow and joy, pain and celebration, grief and hope. Poems become avenues for self-discovery, places of reckoning and transcendence. Each poem attempts to touch what seems insignificant, break open its outer shell, reveal the richness hidden inside. Relationships are held up to light, their facets and flaws studied with an artist's sensual eye. Some are longer narrative poems, others are snapshots of a moment or scene. Several are inspired by the death of the father, becoming vehicles not only for grief, but for memory, identification, reconnection, healing, and affirmation. This thesis takes its title from the final poem, a poem about the complexity of words, their function and meaning, their ability to transform even this most intimate of losses.