Writing

“This poet utilizes specific details that evoke the five senses (e.g. “the smell of singed hair,” “the wig, coifed and styled, cups my ears like the stiff / bodies of crabs,” etc.), imagery that adds texture (e.g. “press-ons in my eyelets,” “Ima sliced through her braid with a silver challah / knife,” etc.), and a kind of lyrical narrative that creates cohesion between all of these poems (familial stories, imagined scenes, cultural traditions, etc.). I also find that the use of form—couplets and columns for domestic poems, lines spaced across the page for the John Donne poems, and the almost double-column stanzas of the definition poems—shows a deep understanding of how a poem’s form should match the content. “