The summer rental

The coastal rental property is one of the only settings named and rendered in the collection. Framed by the setting of “Summer,” the property’s temporary nature resonates with the ephemeral depictions of marriage as a transient state (like life and death). Cloaked in an oppressive heat, the rental property embodies the speaker’s investigation of time and memory, as she chooses to revisit it annually, descending into a loss past while in the house.

Her childhood house

Depicted only in the poem "Telling My Mother," the speaker's childhood home where her mother resides is located on the Pacific coast. This location resonates with imagery of the ocean that permeates the text, and the motif of the shore as a liminal space of contact between opposing forces.

The car

The car appears as a setting for three poems. In “Gramercy,” the speaker and her husband have...