Tree Surgeon
is a series of captured fragments that conjure and question notions of closeness, distance, home, loss, and grief. It is a rumination on how the mundane envelopes us, and how place remakes in us daily. The poems linger in the interstices of the environmental world, the global pandemic, the death of a father from Covid-19, and the leaving and returning to the remnants of a steel town along the Ohio River. The book begins in the impossibility of sound and language and the layered grief of loss. It continues through offered intimations and excavations on how we interpret, and learn to believe in, the complexities of intimacy and attachment to place, people, and ourselves.