The title means Diary of an Eighty-Year-Old: A Poem with More Tears than Hands ; the poems or cantos are in English. The Book is a long, intense, lyrical, and often surreal meditation/recollection of a life in all its complexities, with frequent immersions into the loss of friends and family. In short this is a stunningly beautiful, unique, and unsentimentalized invocation of life and its mirror image, death. Arguelles remains at the peak of his powers with this unforgettably intimate, universal, and deeply human work, where sleep is freed / from waking .