Each poem in the series leads from the immediate experience of pain or fear to a recognition of how the inner landscape changes when loss and death seem immanent and uncertainty breaks open the frames of "ordinary" life. Ordinary words and experiences become charged with new meaning: clinical statements become metaphoric, parabolic; x-ray images take on a whimsical literalness like the occasional child's drawing that gets at what something looks like in a way that is startling because dissociated from the contexts of conventional meaning. The poems record the rawness and unprotectedness of having to face what we may usually devise ways to avoid.