The last visit: Poems

The Last Visit is a book of poems that primarily explores the breaking down of families: fathers struggling with violent tendencies and addictions, mothers who stand strong in the face of enduring abuse, and children who want to escape all this only to find themselves forever haunted by the habits and memories of home. Set in and around the rural South, these poems place the characters against the background of small town life, paying particular attention to how these relationships and communities erode over time. The speakers in this book range from fed-up wives to suicidal fathers, from confessing murderers to lovelorn werewolves, and from children suffering abuses to the complicated and questioning adults they ultimately become. Yet along the way, there are moments of undeniable tenderness and compassion as even the darkest characters find space for redemption and a desire to capture something beautiful in the most harrowing of moments. Additionally, the poems in The Last Visit are very much interested in poetic form, often times manifesting in traditional received verseforms like the sonnet, Ghazal, or ballad, among others. The chosen form for each poem speaks, in some way, to the world of that poem, and ideally augments the reading experience by inviting the reader to consider the specifics of its arrangement, and to read it against the language and meaning of the piece as it unfolds.