Waking Ice records a father's spirals of emotions as he tries to understand and weather his son's addiction, attempts at recovery, and inevitable self-destruction. In a sequence of chiseled poems addressed mostly to his son, the poet memorializes a wide range of complex emotions dealing with fatherhood, sonship, and loss, and uses a variety of poetic styles to chart the gamut of his experience. Here is language brought woundingly close to real life and silence.