To read this volume’s poems is to explore the vicissitudes of time as they impact poetic consciousness. The poets here play with time, or, rather, pit themselves against its flow, to allow us to experience the difficulties of finding ourselves in a fluid world. The poems range in their encounters with time from the playful to the deeply antagonistic. Grace Ma’s speaker in “Relieved Burdens,” in the final lines, seems to take a stoical satisfaction in her present being informed by her family’s past. Zach Da Costa’s “How I Measure Time” interposes the speaker’s personal memories, the stream of self in conversation with self, with reminiscences of past conversations. Bruce Meyer in “Deer in Town” seems incredibly bothered by how the circumstances life offers us lead us to our confusion of both the self and how we should continue forward. However, throughout the various ways of exploring time—the hopeful or the existential—there is rarely an acquiescence to what the past has determined for us.
