The content of the poems in Angels, Pins, Dancing, Prayers centers around five topics: art, religion, death, education, and travel. Poetry understands and dares to discuss God, love, pain, truth, war, death, and bubble gum with an immediacy such experiences warrant. The poems in Angels, Pins, Dancing, Prayers participate in that tradition. I join with numerous contemporary writers addressing the reality of the death of parents and the passing away of a generation so different than the one emerging. As a teacher, my poems on topic of American education express the frustration of many of my peers with public reform efforts. Those poems, along with several addressing the Syrian Crisis and criminal justice are timely and speak with a voice needing to be heard amid the boisterous, unmerciful cable network/social media clatter. However, it is also because of my teaching profession, as well as travel, that specifics of the Western tradition, European history and the 20th century American experience form the central metaphors of many of these poems.