There are books that feel like memory. Hallucinations was built. Over more than two decades, the poems were not gathered so much as constructed — arranged into a series of chambers, each with its own climate, its own pressure, its own way of breathing. This is not a memoir in sequence. It is an argument in structure.

From the first pages — cold water, winter air, a boy stepping into ice — nothing spills loosely. Experience is held inside inherited forms: sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, mirrored and inverted structures. These are not decorative gestures toward tradition. They are pressure systems. They slow the language down. They resist explanation. They keep damage visible.

The book begins in childhood, not as nostalgia, but as installation. Fear enters through thresholds — shoes, attics, frozen lakes. Discipline masquerades as love. Faith hardens into habit. As the work moves forward, it widens in scope: inheritance, grief, marriage, belief systems, bureaucracies, myth, rhetoric, and finally judgment. But it does not move like a story toward redemption. It moves like a widening field of consequence.

Grief turns in circles rather than progressing. Marriage becomes a system of rooms and clocks. War becomes language and classification. Myth emerges not as escape but as infrastructure — older than law, older than nation. Rhetoric, meanwhile, reveals itself as both seduction and shield: the artful language that keeps power intact. The “I” in these poems is not sovereign. It does not solve what it describes. It often arrives after decisions have already been made, after structures are already in motion. Voice here is less confession than witness.

Revision throughout this book was not about refinement. It was about accuracy under pressure. Where language threatened to soften, it was tightened. Where explanation crept in, it was cut back. The aim was not clarity as kindness, but clarity as endurance. At least twenty percent of these poems began as blank verse in my first book, Fountain Street. Many have been re-contextualized here — some absorbing my late father’s commentary directly into the sonnet architecture, others retaining a visible facsimile of his voice as dialectic. His presence is not ornamental. It is structural. To that extent, his intentionality remains active throughout.

If there is a final insight, it is quiet: We are shaped less by what we intend than by the structures we inherit — familial, cultural, theological, rhetorical. Those structures persist long after feeling subsides. Hallucinations does not console. It holds. It holds fear long enough for its pattern to emerge. It holds grief long enough for its rotation to be felt. It holds language long enough for it to turn back on itself. And at the end, it does not resolve. It arrives at a threshold — where structure remains, and what we do within it is still undecided.