There is much mystery surrounding the Book of Job. Who was he? Where was he? What prompts Job's "comforters" to accuse Job the Uzite of wrong-doing as the cause of his suffering? When were Job's words written? How did Job's wife endure her husband's ordeals? And who is innocent among us?

Island of the Innocent is a poetic and dramatic narrative. Other thoughts flag the text-- How one looks at something shapes and changes the object viewed. Voices of the trials of the Native American interject themselves into the text. There is Brevet General Custer riding toward the Little Bighorn. There is a Native American doll in a museum, taken from a battlefield at Ash Hollow in western Nebraska after a massacre. Somewhere along the way, the subject of danger arises. William Tyndale, translator of Job from Hebrew into English, was burned at the stake in 1536 for doing so.

Island of the Innocent is about the wobbliness of translations: the instability of something that's there when viewed a certain way, and not there when viewed another. There are other uncertainties: Who has clean hands when pride was found in the upright Job? And where is the island of the innocent?