Various Modes of Departure: Kore Press First Book Award Winner for 2003 (Kore Press First Book Award for Poetry)

As the title portends, the poems in this debut collection are mostly about the many good-byes said in any given life—to a marriage, a familiar home in a long-beloved locale, an elderly father, a threatened landscape—and despite varied subjects and lighter emotions conveyed at times, there is a seriousness in the poems that permits self-reflection. Memories and imagined fears or familial changes are fleshed out through geography, current and culturally-relevant happenings, brands, and expert knowledge of earth science and botany in poems that are at all times highly sensory and delightful.