Poems in Ear to the Ground remember Stratton's father and mother and draw from the lifestyle that like an album of fading snapshots backgrounds her upbringing on a Colorado cattle ranch. There, she learned to remember on a cultural level, too. Traces of things forgotten in have led her to study prehistoric language; pictures written on stone, petroglyphs and pictographs, and marks left on the surface of the earth. In the blender of language remembered and forgot, she strives to interpret the code. As Lawrence Raab writes, "the past isn't over until we understand it".