Elisions: Transcriptions of a Life: a Contemplation gathers the poems of James D. Cain into a moving record of memory, loss, humor, wonder, family, and love. These poems speak from the spaces where life leaves things out: unfinished questions, remembered places, fading footsteps, old streets, childhood mysteries, desert heat, family departures, and the ache of a love that cannot be replaced. Written with directness and emotional honesty, the collection moves from playful reflection to grief, from Robert Frost’s diverging roads to an oasis in Abqaiq, from boys singing on street corners to a father imagining music with his son, from the freedom of geese to the loneliness of being left behind. At the heart of the book is a voice still asking what remains after time, distance, and death have left. These poems do not seek perfection so much as presence. They preserve the searching mind of a man attentive to the ordinary and the sacred, the funny and the painful, the remembered and the lost. Elisions is a contemplation of roads taken and not taken, of people who leave and people who stay within us, and of the fragments through which a life can still be heard.