The author writes: "I began writing poems when I was 16 and often turn to poetry when prose won’t do. I think that all of my poems are lyrics in the sense that they are attempts to stop or freeze or deny time, or to hold a bit of remembered time. But what makes a lyric requires the music of language and also, I think, a double viewpoint: inside the experience and watching it from somewhere else, sometime else. My themes are almost always elegiac, nostalgic when I am inside of an experience, whimsical and slightly estranged when outside looking in or looking at. In my writing there is a pervasive sense of Vergänglichkeit, evanescence, transitoriness. I like amazement, incongruity—but not mystification or obscurity. Estrangement, defamiliarization—but also delight in recognition. The poems are accompanied by pen-and-ink drawings, compiled in “Improvisations in Two Dimensions.” "