“This contrapuntal blew me away for its deft use of silence and fracture as a gesture of language. There is an elliptical sense to the way the two parts interact—a silence that exists because of time, generational divide, loss, and misunderstanding. There is a daughter and a mother fractured by grief, and a laborious attempt to reattach through song. This poem is a profound, formal demonstration of the Wittgensteinian notion of the inexpressible as a background against the expressed; each side individually more coherent than the marrying of the two together (much like individual people). Is this what grief does to us? That no matter how it is shared, it is a wholly individual action with one person in active grieving and the other, somehow, always a witness to the act? I think the speaker wants there to be some kind of communion, but the poem knows what continents have known for a long time: there will always be space between us, fractals made of our edges, keeping us ever so slightly (or distantly) apart. The best we can do is song, and this one is sung across the gaps we are made of, the gaps a poem makes between the language: a perfect marriage of what’s expressible and what is sometimes, or perhaps always, impossible to express.”