A Poetry Collection
Crossings
Twenty-seven poems and an epilogue of family, threshold, and inheritance — forthcoming from Silver Current Press.
Poetry Collection · Forthcoming · Silver Current Press
Crossings
Twenty-seven poems and an epilogue of family, inheritance, and threshold — a grandfather’s emigration from Ireland, a father’s last hours, a grandmother’s bath, a piano destroyed in anger. Across very different scenes, the collection returns again and again to a small number of physical images: a hand placed on another hand, water reached for or labored toward, and a passage from darkness into light.
“On the dock—hands cupped bending. / Water he cannot reach.” — “Water,” from Crossings
Read the Complete Collection Read a Sampling Book Club Companion
On the Collection
What Crossings Is About
Crossings gathers poems built from a small, recurring vocabulary of image: touch, water, and the passage from darkness into light. A father teaches a son to knot a tie; years later the same hands appear in a photograph by a coffin. A grandmother eased into a warm bath remembers, in her own mind, swimming through cold water off an Irish coast decades before. A grandfather steps through a doorway leaving Ireland, and the poem follows him “from darkness into the light and beyond.” The collection asks to be read the way memory itself works — by accumulation, image returning to image, rather than by a single declared argument.
For a longer critical treatment of these recurring materials, see the essay Mapped in Water and Bone, or the full graduate-level study, The Poetics of Crossings: A Complete Study; for a reading-group guide keyed to specific poems, see the Crossings Book Club Companion.