"We are the echoes/the refugees of echoes," writes Carol Adler in one of her best-known poems. In The Death of Santa Claus & Other Stories, Adler describes how she became the refugee of her own "echoes." "After revisiting these stories many years after they had been highly praised and published in well-known literary and general interest magazines," says Adler, "I found myself feeling the discomfort of a foreigner or refugee. "Each of these stories begged to be transported out of the micro-cosmos of memorabilia into the macro-cosmos of a greater Reality where Creator and Created are One and every description, every nuance becomes a 'holographic echo of itself'; together forming a self-fulfilling prophesy. "I set to work, revising each story and compiling them into a collection that bears the name of one of the most traumatic events in my life."