Judith Garrett Segura is a writer and visual artist who has dedicated her creative life to what she calls The Great Project, a multidisciplinary effort to treat all things of the mind and the aesthetic senses with perfect seriousness, to be true to one's own responses and thoughts, and to be no one but oneself.

What Life Is, her collection of poetry, is a bold new product. It is the embodiment of more than thirty years of thinking and writing about the nature of the human experience. Autobiographical, both by design and necessity, it specifically explores the nature of her experience in...