Longing for Life

"Memory" continues to look at the paradox these invisible visitors present to the woman in the poem—her inability to fully examine and appreciate life while she is in the middle of living it, and the visitors' urge to go back to resolve their own issues now that they have the benefit of a perspective earned through death. Other poems in the collection delicately examine the visitors' state of being and their desire to use the woman in these poems vicariously. In this poem, the visitors serve as psychological mentors attempting to instruct her in how to manage the same things they do, such as the pain of loss, while grasping at the straws of memory to make sense of it all.

The Unreliability of Memory

"Memory" examines the distortion of the memory, making it impossible to reassess or sort out events and how they affected...