Pen and Paper, Wood and Nails gathers four poetry collections: Permanent Ink on Temporary Pages details a narrator's struggle to find his place in the world as he drifts through parallel universes, replaces the people around him with fictional characters, scatters his poetry to the wind, and keeps the things he can't bear to lose by writing them down. A Means to an Ens follows the last man on earth. Years after waking up to find himself seemingly alone in the world, the narrator heads out on a journey to find any sign of life in a desolate place, but is instead confronted by the ghosts of his past. Build Yourself Better chronicles two people who meet, fall in love, fall out, and then fall apart, and what they do in the aftermath with the pieces that remain. B-Sides and Rarities features poems originally cut from the above collections.