Author Irene Marques has launched her latest poetry collection, The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet (Mawenzi House), on September 18. The collection explores a profound yearning for a language that conveys the essence of existence. Marques seeks a vernacular that transcends the constraints of rationality and objectivity, imposed by self-interested systems that limit our ontological experience. Her poetry urges a return to primal ways of seeing, unfiltered by the material interests that suppress them. The poems invite us to rediscover a pure, untainted language—a space for rebirth, free from the restrictive grammar and rhetoric that have distorted our understanding.