Things feel on the verge of coming undone in many of the poems of Starting Again. The poems express an impulse to move beyond that, to start again or to want to stitch together rifts in ordinary moments like the aftermath of a hospital stay, getting stuck on a sandy road in a desert, childlessness, loss of political conviction, depression, and other everyday threats to a sense of hope. The poems ask whether we know what we have and if we can see experience as whole when we feel small disconnects-tugs "at a loose thread."