On the night of June 12, 2011, while I¿was working on a revised edition of Heart's Ladder to include some poems of the tsunami shock waves, my own body endured a tsunami of its own. A rare heart condition called an aortic dissection, which few survive, presented itself. When I woke up several days after the operation, I found myself in a dream-like state that, thanks to my regular habit of writing, I was able to record." -- M. A. Schorr