This thought-provoking collection of poems poses profound questions to readers. T.C. Monk grapples with universal questions about how we, as individuals, create meaning and determine what matters most to us. What distinguishes Monk's poetry from that of other incarcerated writers is his ability to transcend the concrete constraints of his life without dwelling on the past. Like flowers blooming through cracked sidewalks, his poetry stands as a testament to how beauty, freedom, and light can emerge from the harsh environment of confinement, restraint, and unnatural shadows. Compiled over more than 20 years, this collection serves as an intellectual and emotional cartography of one man's search for emotional wisdom, truth, and peace.

His poetry is deliberate; each word and image is carefully chosen. Monk's poems are not for those who are easily intimidated or who seek poetry that requires no effort to read. They are neither cerebral poems nor spontaneous eruptions of powerful feelings. Nor are they mere rhymes as an end in themselves, nor a chaotic landscape of words and letters scattered haphazardly into the wind to land and sprout independently. Instead, the poems are meticulously crafted. They form a scaffold upon which Monk constructs a spiritual lighthouse—a place to muse, imagine, create, conjecture, and conjure incantations and songs, as well as an effort to explore and transcend dimensions of time, space, and spirit. In doing so, he lays bare not only the shadow and light of his own soul but also the essential human spirit that binds us all. His poems teach us about our shared humanity, showing that what we love, fear, hate, and desire are inextricably and intimately connected. In their relative proximity, these emotional dimensions of our lives reveal our fragility even as they stand as a testament to human resilience.