Returning to the City of Hyphens is a collection of original poems and prose that is largely inspired by people, places, and languages that no longer exist. Each of the works included in this collection aspires to transact a return. The destination of record—the City of Hyphens—is, of course, not a real city, but an imaginary city that is inhabited by real punctuation, by hyphens—each one calmly mediating separation and inseparability. Everything we can know of the City necessarily involves preemption, interruption, and disruption—the negotiated terms of return.

The collection opens with Future Perfect, poems dedicated to members of my family. The persona poems in The Return of Herr Ruhe examine some of the concerns of an exile returning "home" after decades of absence. The poems in the third section, Returning to the City of Hyphens, address the inevitability of return, in its many guises, valences, voices. The final section presents the first two parts of a longer prose narrative, Moritz Tannenbaum and the Green Knight, based on the 14th century Middle English epic poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but set in 1970s Brooklyn.