The Epigraph opening this collection offers a choice: “...Let us die in abstinence / Of one another, sigh gales, yet refuse / To speak the solving word which opens chaos... (Howard Nemerov, ‘False Solomon’s Seal’).” Choose one story from the collection and identify how the story’s dilemma mirrors the Epigraph’s question of whether to live silently in a life of emptiness or speak and invoke chaos.

Compare and contrast the widow in “Lonesome Road Blues” and the divorced woman in “Hindsight” in terms of how each confronts her demons of loneliness and alienation.

Discuss the significance of gardening and the dying Solomon’s seal plants in the failed, 40-year marriage in “Solomon’s Seal.”