Ash & Embers embodies the inherent messiness of lifeโs journey, sorting detritus from treasures, identifying and naming memory, finding categories that reflect lifeโs winding pathways and its treacherous footing. Taking his various rolesโson, brother, husband, father, grandfather, neighbor, teacher, citizen, believer, writer, and readerโas narrative stances, Zoller considers the details of life and its larger forces. Thematically complex, Ash & Embers accepts that the journey is translated through the often difficult tool of language; thus, it embraces the tension that language is inadequate, alien, and, paradoxically, a tool for recognition and understanding. In Zollerโs poems how we speak about lifeโas physical passage, as spiritual pilgrimage, as imagined patterns, as emotional canvas, as interwoven narrative strands, and as social constructโall these voices meet in one conversation. Between โPhotographsโ that begins the book and โHard Copyโ that brings it to a close we find everything from first impressions to โSecond Knowings,โ from notes on the poems of Mao and Seamus Heaney to prayers to the God of time, eternity, and love.