Through familiar objects, gestures, and relationships, Shanley explores the interplay of duration and instant, layers of history and the edge of the present moment. A bend in time moves through these poems like a crack in the glass, calling quiet attention to the turbulence of memory and the inadequacy of narrative time. A mantra of universal change drones delicately beneath these poems, unwritten but present nonetheless. Here, time may steal cruelly from itself, as a sudden wind snatch’s one’s attention. Here, aging may be a refinement, a smoothing of time’s and one’s own edges. Here, layers of accumulated histories are almost tactile, almost tenable, as they build skyward and spill out around and from us. My life / issued forth like a bridge / of hands.