This collection explores the isolation most of us experience at one point or another in our lives. The characters in these poems range from an adventurous scientist who arrives in the U.S. from behind the Iron Curtain to a woman in a diner searching for her iceberg, from a climber on Mt. Everest to a princess trying to escape her glass mountain, from an elderly couple stuck in a building without an elevator to a dog chained among banana trees, from a dolphin in an aquarium to trees that act like people. All struggle to come to grips with separation and exclusion. The poems in Shades of Isolation dramatize that while life often brings pain, we must not surrender to it. Instead, we must seek, observe, touch, and trust.