The poems in Carapace explore the tensions between life and death as they battle for equal play in the natural world. As in her last two collections of poetry ”The First Day of Winter and Fault Line ” Lush returns to the themes of loss, death, birth, and rebirth, but with a more unforgiving eye and savage vision, exploring the dualities and ironies of experiencing these states simultaneously. At times, these poems are told through the eyes of a new mother as she attempts to balance the complex and often-times conflicting emotions that accompany motherhood: joy, anger, uncertainty, awe and fear. At other times, they are told through the eyes of a bereft narrator as she comes to grip with death and loss. Driving these poems is an often random and unexplained energy that arises from nature, the life force that underpins the natural world as it gives way to both regeneration and degeneration, and the surrendering to these forces as the narrator tries to arrive at some sort of understanding. The results are short lyric-narratives written in a highly imagistic mode.