The sharpness of the poems’ blades—whether literal, like the blades that peel Cassavas and leave the speaker's arms scarred, or deeper injuries of trauma and loss—sits alongside their subtlety and tenderness.
These are poems of deep attentiveness to the smallest encounters, and to the largest questions of love, doubt, solitude and migration.
Where trees hold ‘time in absent leaves’, these poems mourn roots but refrain from ‘easy paths’, offering, instead, the force and grace of a numinous poetics.
As part of the Dekeyser & Friends Fellowship, he "worked with [Markus Wasmeier and] an international group of young people to restore a 17th-century farmhouse in the German Alps utilizing original materials, traditional tools, wood-crafting and handicraft techniques.
"[27] He also volunteered part-time teaching literature at Robertsport High School in Grand Cape Mount County.