The poems in Lissa Kiernan's The Whispering Wall walk a tightrope between worlds-grief and praise, beauty and ruin, revelation and secrets, the sacred and the profane, dark humor and wonder-and, in that daringly exhilarating and very tricky journey create another world that merges opposites, that accepts both the willingness and unwillingness to embrace all the different dimensions of a life intensely lived. Kiernan deftly weaves her own personal narrative into the lives of other artists, historical events, computer systems, and mythological figures so that the collection subtly expands the dimensions of what the self means.