“Drawing life / from life / so that nothing remains / but content.” The poems in Beautiful Methods range across various terrains of skeptical apprehension and doubt—the uses of technology and reason, the unifying illusions of media, the meaning of daily experience, the images of memory. This movement is by contrast or opposition, both within the poem and in the relationship between poems. Or this movement is virulent mutation.

“And now, it doesn’t matter how small the gift you have. It is what you have. And I said, This is what is given you. And I lifted him up to his desk and said, Now write. And he said, What? I answered, Write that you are weak, that you allow even the mere voice of another, imagined subjectivity to compel you to your desk to write.” Pen Sharpening Exercises interweaves poetry, prose poems, and prose into a labyrinthian investigation of writing and the self.

“On Tuesday he gave candy to his family and neighbors, but wouldn’t explain why. / He got his hair cut the way his mother likes and told her he would do anything she wants, she said. / You’re never like this, she said. What happened?” Abode is a kind of mystery or riddle of the turning, or the inability to return. This piece began with an obsession with Beckett’s The Lost Ones, whose opening line is “Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.”