“A book unread, many books unread, leaves of many books torn away, loose, falling like the leaves of trees, falling infinitely with no landing, a book unread.…A book unread, the great tragedy of a man’s life, to add to the accumulated sorrows, the collected disappointments, the losses.”

Abscission Layer is a riff on time and loss, a lamentation on aging and death, gathering images and impressions together, trying to form understanding and meaning. A family patriarch, a union organizer, reflecting on his immigration to America, the progress of the union and the family through hard times, and the principles by which he lived. An old botanist remembering minute details of trips to remote places long ago, but foggy about chronology. An old man in a nursing home, half-conscious, shouting a kind of demented poetry. And another narrator, deliberately undefined and amorphous, relating memories of a friend, and recollecting a young love lost and romanticized. The intentional repetition of images and thoughts, inspired by narratives originating in oral tradition, helps to illuminate and glaze the interior worlds of the characters in this novella-length prose poem.