Following the history of poem-as-riddle, BEAD might be said to be an exercise in metaphor in which the tenor is hidden (from the poet, from the world) and disparate vehicles (beads, cathedrals, horns) offered as points of only partial comparison. Solution becomes a poetic act for which the poet (the world) must accurately determine which comparisons are illuminating and which are not.

BEAD is as perplexed by what a thing is as by what it means, and thus combines the associative movements of poetry with the argumentation of the essay to stage central issues in phenomenology and existentialism. These verse-essays extract language from geometry, sacred space, and Objectivist aesthetics to draw a shape around Uncanny experiences that forge a liminal space between our real and imagined lives.