HOW WE ENTER THE PALACE is a book born of faith and patience. The book has a strong sense of the divine, the larger world where all people, places, events, and knowledge exist, both simultaneously and chronologically. One way the poet accesses that faith is through persona poems in the voices of Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, Helen Keller, and other characters who have shown up along the way. The persona poem breaks the barriers of what the poet CAN know and allows her entrance into what others have known. Inevitably, the voices and visions of these mystics slip into all the poems in the book, so the most mundane moment (remembering something stupid from years earlier) becomes a moment of grace.