With its focus on memory, illness, and their ramifications, Seeing Things explores overlapping roles of a daughter whose mother is entering the beginning stages of dementia and of a mother whose daughter is struggling with depression. These poems also witness a woman juggling her own memories of abuse and survival who lives in a world unsettled by shifting boundaries of truth and fabrication. Ultimately, Seeing Things explores the ways that we distort or preserve memory, define or alter reality, see or disregard those around us. This is a brave collection that gives voice to lament while at the same time welcoming “the hidden angels and saints” ever present along the way. Amid the anguish of loss and despair, it includes odes that dare to praise “each breaking day, dangerous / yet divine in all / its gorgeous glory.”
