Circle Back: Poems

Circle Back is a collection of poems that explores grief and memory's inability to preserve everything lost to time. The collection examines how to process both personal and collective loss, and questions what happens when language and memory reach their limits. Confronted with a year meant to end all others, the poems ask whether anything can contain what remains of hope. The poems follow grief's winding path, where the boundary between reality and dreams becomes unclear. Cows have otherworldly eyes, records play under cactus needles, a father becomes his own child, and the dead transform into something more complex. Despite these liminal spaces, a thread of promise appears in poetry itself. Though language is flawed, the collection suggests we still turn to it for permanence and love, much like Keats sketching himself back into place. The poems detail the difficult work of healing, capturing moments of reprieve within grief's strange circle—two friends running through a sprinkler, a garden of startled birds, wildflowers discovered on a gray morning run. The collection presents a vulnerable and nuanced exploration of loss and recovery.