Poetry--Collections.

"The Light That Calls Them Back" is a collection of 23 poems completed during my
three years of graduate studies. The poems in this collection are memory based and rely
on the use of metaphor to convey emotion. These writings were compiled to demonstrate
a range of poetic styles and subject matter. Most importantly, each poem in some way
deals with the poet's relationship to different places and the memories (often hazy or
inaccurate) associated with certain settings. Additional themes present throughout these
works are the loss that comes with both death and abandonment and the relationship
among visual art and images and poetry. The voice in these poems represents the poet in
different stages of life. Many of the poems appear to deal with mystical or fantastical
elements. These represent the poet's imagination and belief in the unexplained. Some are
meant to be taken literally, while others become metaphors or evidence of the poet's
desire to escape the ordinary world.

Speak, Shade is a book of lyric verse indebted to the poetics of W. S. Merwinespecially
The Moving Target and The Lice- and late Paul Celan. It eschews
punctuation, and uses paradox, ambiguous syntax, derangement of the senses, and
surreal imagery among its tropes. Its themes include- but are not limited toblindness
as a spiritual condition, the inefficacy of the imagination before time and
death, the line between dream and reality, and the silence of God. Some motifs
occurring in the text are parts of the body, stars, books, light, mirrors, and shadows.