The Magic Flower is a symbolist sequence collecting scraps of language from imagination and history. The sonnets circle around anxieties about connection, value, and loss-as both body and mind grapple with transformation, disease, and fecundity. This book dwells in the tension between the poet and his subject matter, by calling into question the mutual transformation wrought by each party on the other: how does living in and processing in words a world that is insistently separate from the self shape the subjectivity of the poet?