In Lullaby for One Fist, Andrea Werblin explores the anatomy of destructive relationships and the now what? at their ends. Intimate, accessible, and sharply self-conscious, these musical poems trace the arc of such a relationship, conveying the speaker's struggle to invent freedom. They also reflect how often such inventions can reveal themselves to be trickery and self-deception, yet are at the same time very necessary practice runs and steps toward genuine independence.Werblin's poems also speak about the slow and painstaking work of self-recovery, of the self as a burden one carries, and of the self as a previously unoccupied and unfamiliar territory into which one slowly makes her way. Metallic and pointed, yet fluid, these poems course strongly through the emotional veins; they brace and jar melodically as steady, illuminating undercurrents rise from the syntax in a contrapuntal dance and shed sudden and intense beams of light on the confusing and intensely human experience of extricating ourselves from ties that damage.