Teresa Carson, the youngest of ten in a blue-collar family, writes unflinchingly about her chaotic past about which she had been taught to keep silent - her mentally ill mother, her enraged and abandoning father, her schizophrenic brother, her rape at fourteen, and her long-term relationship with a married man. It is her brother's suicide that makes the poet aware of how dangerous shame-filled silence can be, and it is his suicide that pushes her to find her voice. Throughout, the poet chronicles her struggle to come to terms with the range of emotions she feels for her brother - including "bad" ones, such as her relief when he dies - and to understand why he committed suicide.