Heirloom Language is full of poems about life and dying, growing up and growing old; about how being loved transcends endings, and how sometimes anger and irony are ways of expressing love. I sometimes describe myself as a short-attention-span novelist, and my poems as stories, chapters, characters, notes—trying to make sense of our life. But reality is defiantly chaotic, and makes some poems partial truths, jokes, or outright lies. It isn’t their fault. That’s how things worked out.