A Child’s Seance begins when young Weyman moves a Ouija board’s planchette hoping to hear his mother’s voice. What leaps out is something ineffable. Weyman looks for a way to translate it. He takes up painting, trying to rewrite the immigrant story, but his depictions fail to resemble the clichéd tranquility of mountain sages in Chinese portraiture. He speaks to ants and plants, consults with a sister who fears abduction by aliens, and reads the tea leaves of humankind’s future colonization of faraway planets.

The poems in A Child’s Seance explode grief itself to consider everything that composes it, from the intimate to the historical to the cosmic. They ask what the poem and its syntactical paintbrush can catch of our fleeting, all-too-human lives, forever grappling with the things poetry will always miss.