Many of the connections she makes seem to be very rambling, and the poems that she prevents are more stream-of-thought than poetry usually is. With Armantrout, for instance, her poetry was very abstract but still seemed to have a meaning, even if that meaning was often left up to the reader to decide. The short poems at the end, in particular, seem to have little coherence to them. However, as someone who has gone through insomnia before (if not clinical then the kind that all college students go through at one time or another) I can understand how something that makes no sense to you in the morning after you've gotten sleep can make perfect sense when you're typing or writing it up at 2am.
In this way, going between prose, poetry and scans of the book that she inherited, the disjointedness of the book is a perfect example of an insomniac's thought patterns as he or she just tries to get through the night.
I like the point made here about the mindset of the insomniac being a kind of form for Howe. i felt throughout the book that she was operating entirely on her own system of logic; the connections she makes make perfect sense, just not to us. It's interesting to try and make connections between the various subjects that crop up in the book because they do in fact connect, but often not completely or in ways that are obvious. The work often appears to me as a kind of roundabout stream of lengthy consciousness. I also thought that one particular subject in the book, lace, helped me make sense of the piece as a whole. Lace can be made by removing threads/replacing threads in an existing fabric (such as in the altered books that Howe is so interested in) and a "true lace" is made purely by twining threads together independent of a backing...much like her book.
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