Beginning with its opening poem, Geode, in which we see a young girl smashing open rocks with a hammer, Anvil, Clock, & Last announces a preoccupation with explosions. These works point to the early experiences that shape our lives and initiate the lifelong struggle between memory and forgetting. They are also poems of mortality that focus on death and the line of descent. Some poems consider unconscious childhood explorations and what we learn from them, and others grapple with a daughter's loss of a father to Alzheimer's disease. Roeske uses the anvil, the clock, and the last as metaphors for the tools with which she forges poems, and in doing so, hammers out and cracks open the details of her life.