Arbor Vitae

<p class=ql-align-justify><strong>Love is the elixir which heals. Love offers dignity and connection and allows room for the most potent and challenging of reparations: forgiveness. Like a double-exposed photograph the language in <em>Arbor Vitae</em> the tree of life offers a delicate ribboning of shifting perspectives. The narration is activated as a witness as consciousness is observed and trespasses a bare view of a multilayered landscape. Here a pensive topography of solitude and loss unfolds. </strong><strong style=color: rgba(12 125 131 1)>This book-length pastoral poem seeks accountability and compassion for institutional and political trauma.</strong><strong> Recent and historic human rights abuses merge to encompass a devastation that imprints the collective psyche. As Whitman writes the scenery is the source: the smallest sprout... goes onward and outward nothing collapses. <em>Arbor Vita</em>e in a dream state from the shores of Guantanamo to the unfiltered sun-burnished pines of the multi-continental holocaust seeks hope seeks language as a root or a sapling that might break through the asphalt. Over amends for the disgrace of human rights abuses -voices merge in a textural elegiac for what might lift upward-unfurling leaves harnessed toward that one push into a great light.</strong></p><p><br></p>