As per the publisher: "Each day I am the first of many weird encounters," begins Rober Balun's Traces, a sentiment as syllogistic as it is spooky. What follows is a lateral navigation through modes both syntactical and elemental. Where is meaning imprinted in the universe? Can the signifier every truly conjure the signified? Can it be reversed? Can it obliterate? Is living transitive or intransitive? Balun's words do not answer these questions but further extrapolate them, opening his language like an almanac. Traces propels the reader through its pages as though the reader, too, were nothing more than the sum of its symbols, malleable to both worlds, mineral and lexical, leaving us all pensively pondering "will I remember I am the water when I drink from it."