Thigh’s Hollow locates the wound Jacob suffers from wrestling with a divine stranger, but in a voice more Esau than Jacob: a “box this telling comes through not of.” These transgressions leave a longing in their wake, a fundamentally alienated “nameless crawling upward I.” This upward crawl brings us ever closer, through syntactic doubling and punning and play, to genuine communion. Through these bent and brimming poems, we witness a wounded voice trying to heal itself: “my very defenses / grow in me the pearl.”