• Finalist for the 2022 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award

Searching for Signal is a long poem that bears witness to the quotidian, disorienting shifts of grief as a father makes his way toward his death over 3 seasons. This is mourning conducted in situ, the gift of observing one man quietly taking his leave and the impacted hole it leaves behind. The language is mix of narrative lyric and fragmentary breath-spaced verse; the silences are his private silences, alluding to memory, family trauma and shame. The hunter, the gatherer who never stopped trying for epiphanies, a daughter engaged in the same effort, frankly facing the span of a swift human lifetime that may pass without revelation or resolution. If there is redemption it is in the daughter bringing clarity to the physical condition of living and dying and the emotional intricacies of existence.

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your body remembers the marbles
you used as a calendar
each a contemplation
an appreciation for the day
you’d been given
then tossed
the jar emptying over years
you bought twenty years too many
we take them in our pockets
where we go
leave deposits of you
in the celluloid narrative
in the Bay of Pigs I launched
a blue-eyed one
in the glare
it fell into the sky twice