This is a book of poems to remember those for whom 'time had lapsed.' The poems begin innocently with common collections, rocks or coins, and progressively, become memories that gather the death in the folds of language, to commemorate the passage. The words are most forceful for those closest to the heart of the narrator. The poems mourn a secret bond with each lost one. In the work of grief, special harmonies in poetry open the soul to the transcendent joy of simply being.

THE SHOCK of LOVE is a book about spirit. It is a book within a book. The book found within is a manuscript entitled THE SHOCK of LOVE. It is purportedly written by Paolo Cellini, Professor of Romance Languages and a student of the era of the troubadours and courtly love. Based on the idea of a book of the heart, current during that time, it is divided into nine chapters that give allegorical detail of the journey of love, a love that completes the spirit in a person. There the reader follows the courtship, the 'alchemical' marriage, and the dark gestation before emerging transformed and completed. The outer book, the book that encloses the found manuscript, tells the story of Cellini as well as speculating on why it came to be written.

Appelbaum (philosophy, State U. of New York) explores how the disruption of the intellect fractures consciousness, which loses its world-making power and realigns itself with wholeness and purpose. He discusses such aspects as the perception of the formless and formless perception, toward a somatic critique of retentivity, sympathy and the plight o

The final installment in Appelbaum's three-volume exploration of the "intervening subject" -- volumes one and two are The Stop and Disruption, also published by SUNY Press -- The Delay of the Heart explores themes of responsibility and initiation and offers an "initiatory ethics". It intimates a secret of delay that is behind all traditional teachings and suggests ways that a sensitivity to a sacred obligation emerges from the heart of human experience.

In 'Jacques Derrida's Ghost' David Appelbaum explores three of Derrida's favourite themes: the other, death, and the work of mourning. He shows how Derrida's unique philosophy, mindful of ghosts, proposes a respectful attitude toward otherness - whether the 'other' be corporeal or indeed phantom.

Imagine listening at a keyhole to a conversation with the task of transcribing it, and the result may be a text similar to the present one. from Part I: Stagework
In a series of meditations responding to writings by Emmanuel Levinas, David Appelbaum suggests that a flawed grammar warrants Levinas to speak of language at the service of ethics. It is the nature of performance that he mistakes. Appelbaum articulates this flaw by performing in writing the act of the philosophical mind at work. Incorporating the voices of other thinkers in particular Levinas s contemporaries Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot sometimes clearly, sometimes indistinctly, Appelbaum creates on these pages a kind of soundstage upon which illustrations appear of what he terms a rhetorical aesthetic, which would reestablish rhetoric, rules for giving voice and not ethics as the correct matrix for understanding the otherness and beyond-being that Levinas seeks in his work."