Theory of the Girls is a dreamlike elegy for Maria Baranda's father, an architect and the "draftsman" of the book. The drama of life and death plays out between the draftsman, now in another world, and his two living grandchildren. The possible-life-meets the impossible-eternity-which only poetry, and perhaps mysticism, can represent. The draftsman, a figure of order, sometimes becomes muddled and disordered. Yet love and sorrow remain present as we move between the real and the unreal. "What he draws is always the presence of the world / the hope in the arms of the girls." At times, the poem breaks the fourth wall, becoming a character in its own story.
