Thirty-four poems transformed by DeWitt Henry from the original prose by twenty-nine classic and contemporary authors, ranging from Tolstoy to Twain, Joyce to Kinkaid, Woolf to Munro, Swift to D.H. Lawrence, Eliot to Bowen, and more. "By following instinct and trusting my impulses," the author writes, "I propose my thematic blind, which includes loneliness, grief, isolation, the patriarchal bell-jarring of women, capitalist and racist exploitation of the needy, issues of conscience and dehumanization in war, courtship, the male gaze, fantasy in love, vitality in dying, male helplessness in birthing, children defying parents, the need for 'stupidity, ' sentimental excesses, nihilism and its terrors, and grace and urgency of art itself. In short, the issues of mu life, of living, and of our times, if not all times."