What is the author's style in Our Side by Carol Muske-Dukes?

Muske-Dukes uses symbolic language in an attempt to describe the abstract concept of death. She refers to the "great expanse of water" between the two sides: the side of death and the side of life. She calls the dead person a "sailor," as if death were a journey across that great expanse of water. She continues with the concept of death's being something very large when she refers to death as "the great canyons of the infinite." This image is a different type of expanse, so infinitely large that the living cannot cross it. The different kind of "distance" inside a dead person is that which "draws them away." The distance represents death but also may be a reference to a soul, which in some belief systems is humankind's connection with the infinite.