Offers meditations on cultural memory, race relations, and sexual identity in the South. This collection of poems couples engagements with topics of race and sexuality with reflections on personal and cultural histories.
Throughout Madden repeatedly turns to the artifacts that demarcate his memories of youth in the rural South to ask how we define home, how we form meaning out of the silences and losses of the past, and what rituals and relationships might sustain us as we inch forward across a rough terrain of shifting emotional and moral challenges.