The thirty poems that make up The Cadence of a Neighboring Tribe are organized by the author into three groups of ten units each. The first, permeated by the author's youthful experiences, represent a "moving on" and a "coming of age," in which the early experiences are rearticulated in the linguistic fragments they engendered. In the second section, those fragments are added to imagery based on bicycle riding, which celebrate the pleasures of movement and orchestration. In the final section, Ballerini pushes the language further, breaking the "laws of speech," as he works toward the "tenuous inflection of the real."