Train Dance

Train Dance adopts the rhythm and return of the commute through the Hudson Valley into Manhattan as a motif for the echoes of memory and event that contour a life. Reflecting on the place of poetry amid the urban hustle―a way one might “Carry myself like a tune/ Into the chorus of the city”―Wells records a series of linked journeys in which a son comes to understands his mother’s death and writing engraves events in memory, retaining events as locations―station stops, as it were―to which one returns.