The Interior Act is a movement from terror to a kind of interior peace, interspersed with praise, obsession, memory, rant, death, and love. Unusual in a poetry collection, Golden explores at length the fracturing actions and memories of an imagined life (JJ) and the fragmented witness of an alter life (Xavier). The landscape of the mind is a central theme in Golden's work, and in this gripping collection he negotiates a narrow path through poems and fragments which attempt to declare their truth, be it brutal, glorious, desperate, and solacing.