Such powerful, meaning-twisting line breaks can also be found at other scenic stops in Hell, such as in the poem, “Site Visit”:

More than a line break, the emphatic stanza break between “who must be guilty of what was done // to them” is nothing short of brilliant, in terms of its collective use of word choice, word arrangement, line break, and sentence structure. The sentence is our Virgil, in this case guiding us into deeper questioning of the standard beliefs about “sinners,” which constitutes the object of the sentence. “The burning flesh of those” leaves off with a line break which invites us to finish the sentence in the expected way: The burning flesh of those who sinned. As the sentence moves into the next line, however, it invites us to question this traditional judgment: the choice of “must” in “who must be guilty” is far from a judgmental “who is guilty,” and the semantic arrangement of “what was done,” does not assert the blame that “what they did” would. When the sentence then continues onto the next line with “to them,” the shade of doubt grows into a shadow as large as God’s indisputably Miltonic “obdurate cliff.” The question that arises is: done to them by whom? The answer: by God himself. The sentence releases increasingly more doubt into the reader’s received ideas about sin as it literally snakes its way down from line to line.

Shadows show up elsewhere throughout the trip, as one might expect in Hell, and Wilner conveys her vision of them in ways that continue to alter common perceptions, as God’s shadow does in “Site Visit.” For example, see how she retells the story of Jesus in “Magnificat”:

It would take several pages to fully explicate the poem excerpted here, and almost as many to tease apart the layers of the excerpt alone. Indeed, many of Wilner’s poems are as dense in meaning as they are powerful in imagery. However, we may graze the meaning of the poem by pointing to the way she retells the common touch points of the life of Jesus from an entirely different perspective, from his time at Mary’s breast through to his crucifixion. Just as God casts a shadow in “Site Visit,” Jesus casts a shadow in the beginning of this poem, only to be replaced by an equally menacing shadow by the poem’s end:

Wilner uses the same Biblical language to continue the human story that began with Jesus. In our increasingly secularized society, there is still a huge shadow that looms over us: our own. Just as Jesus’ worshippers “came like ants,” earlier in the poem, “we… speak, as if the world / were our diorama,” waging war as if our fellow humans were no more than “tin solders,” living in a world where the “Boardroom” has become our god. Whereas Jesus grew huge from feeding at Mary’s breast, “the new giant” is eerily far less human, feeding “on air… on radio waves, in cyberspace.”

The above quote’s reference to “desert storm” is not accidental, and brings up the corollary theme of war as a human-orchestrated hell that runs through the collection. The first stanza of the poem “Back Then, We Called It ‘The War’” discreetly catalogs several wars in history, from ancient times through the Cold War:

Wilner maximizes the impact of her references to specific wars by pluralizing them. Thus, while “burning libraries” will bring to mind the Alexandrian War, “fallen walls” the Cold War, and “killing fields” the Cambodian genocide which followed the Vietnam War, using plural nouns highlights the fact that these are far from isolated events in history. She further maximizes the impact of these horrors by framing them inside her mind, opening the poem with “And though, since that time, I have read many books… nevertheless, I do not understand.” This framework sets up the speaker’s internalization of these utterly nonsensical horrors, and through it, our own internalization of them. As a result, this poem is emotionally and intellectually demanding, as are many others in the collection. Indeed, midway through the book, the poem “High Noon” situates war as being directly inside us: