The poems in When I Reach for Your Pulse confront and orbit the aporia of familial suicide, trauma, and grief. Through language that is by turn incisive and musical, the poems sink into and resist the gravity of that suicide, and the unsolvable 'execution' of self it represents. The disorienting, violent absence returns the poet to the bodily world: its atoms, its physics, its sound and culture. The poet's living tongue fails to replace or displace the "mangled" tongue of loss. Sound anchors the poet who would rather float away from the aporia of his father's suicide. Cultural inheritance survives this loss through assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme that mime the musicality of inherited Sanskrit chant. Imagery and recurring motifs from the animal world, such as the bird and dog, are devices through which the poet returns to the roots of the body, to ground himself in unsolvable violences and stay with them, beyond the personal and into the political. Together, the poems comprise a make-shift scaffolding onto which the surviving self can cling and reimagine, destroy and rebuild. By facing the moment and pulling toward it, the poems gather the potential energy to leap from its tether, to try to make sense of existence alongside the ever-present noose.