(Novel.) A hidden geometry underlies life, as veins and arteries underwrite pacts that bind a family’s blood to its strife. Agreements made in the shade of twilit grottoes by ancestors hiding in forests on their wedding day, summon dark forces which surface from their magic rings seeking to be repaid, sometimes centuries later, and in the most sinister of ways. This is the poetry of belief, a raven whispering of the impropriety of grief, of a family whose shapes throw to caution shadows that take from its arms every life’s brief moment on this world’s stage. The price of power and fame too high for those sharing a name. This is the story of a curse, of a fate worsened as its terms age, of sons who, despite their best efforts, cannot shake what their fathers forgave them. No confession can remedy their transgression until every line has been erased. *“His chutzpah is bracing, brazen. [He has what] one finds in Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, and the words of other great, rock songsmiths. Dude’s got guts!”* —George Elliott Clarke, Poet Laureate of Canada