How the End Begins juxtaposes the world's seductions and incessant clamoring for more with the invisible world: the quiet, the call of the desert, and the pull to faith. The book chronicles this move toward faith and away from the "dingen" (things or stuff). Within the worlds of these poems are Orthodox monks, Emily Dickinson, anorexic patients inside a hospital ward, Larry Levis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Captain Beefheart, Henry Darger, Jean Genet, Goya, Karen Carpenter, Joan of Arc, and, of course, God. How the End Begins is a burning down, a kind of end of the world while, at the same time, a new, triumphant beginning.