Kirjahaku

This eclectic selection of poems straddle decades, generations and continents and constitute the stories collected by the author over a lifetime. The works reflect on the human condition, what the oral historian Studs Terkel called "life and its uncertainties," love's exuberance and sad needs, birth's joy and death's dark wounds, the comedy of communal days and the wearying tears of isolating night. Its language seeks to plummet the power of the communicated word, the fragility of understanding, and the frustrations of muteness.

Spanning images and voices from around the globe, as well as from the tiny, muted corners of a woman's dreams, this new collection spins and stretches and soothes with its vibrant and teasing language and rich stories.

As a woman packs up her house and sorts through its history, she follows her imagination and the paper trail of long-buried secrets to dislodge the grip of memory and master the words for deeply engrained abuses and assuaging joys. She sifts through the attributes of wood, wind, snow, sea and place to celebrate the power of family and relationships, to delve the wisdom in world cultures, to document the pathos of ruthless local and national events, and to arrive at an acceptance of solitude amid hopes for a more gracious and embracive future society.