Joy's tanka are distinguished by her honest, uneuphemized observations of the world and its various denizens, human and otherwise, living and dead, great and small, but mostly small. Small people, small animals, small dreams, small treasures, and most poignant of all, the small pleasures of being alive to the beauty of the ordinary and the preciousness of the common. To some one else, a violet is just a weed creeping among trodden stones, but to Joy, it is a gift; beautiful, thriving under foot even when stepped on, a persistent, determined, gently beautiful form of life.