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Stories Passed On turns stories of self-annoited hurt and trouble into a critique of outlaw posturing.

The page sounds suspicious of people who turn pain into identity and dedication into performance. Its refusal to go beyond the truth reads as a push against theatrical suffering.

'Stories Passed On' mythologizes the troublemaker with a clinical image - 'Ever as a surgeon at a thousand tables' - casting 'Hell rasers' as people 'formed / by their dedicated / twist to the opposite.' Their defiance needs no embellishment: 'In outrageous task / need not go beyond / the truth.' The poem closes on a self-made ordeal, 'In their lives / of hurt / and self annoited trouble,' where the misspelled 'annoited' lets self-anointing and self-appointed grief blur into one consecrated wound.