Dark Tourism explores the grief borne of losing a connection to the past. As detailed in the prologue poem, "Baucis and Philemon," the speaker's stories in Dark Tourism "have been resistant / to [their] drownings" and that refusal to stay buried has "[sent] ripples in every direction." The voices in Dark Tourism track the trajectory of these ripples by animating the past, especially through the formal work in the partial sonnet crown that acts as centerpiece to the manuscript. The sonic and rhythmic repetitions reinforce an idea central to Dark Tourism as a whole: the things we inherit from the past endure, with or without our permissions, and the speakers seek to interpret this haunting in a way that unifies past and present.