How does the poet use repetition in the poetry collection, Native Guard?

Several of the poems utilize the poetic technique of repetition as a means of emphasizing certain ideas and utterances. The most notable example of this is in the poem “Miscegenation,” a ghazal in which the name “Mississippi” is repeated at the end of every couplet (36). This repetition serves the purpose of drawing the reader’s attention to the location of the poem, which in effect colors the meaning of the events of the poem by placing them in a political and cultural context that is repeatedly emphasized. Another notable example is in the poem “Incident,” a pantoum where the second and fourth lines of each quatrain are repeated in the first and third lines of the following quatrain. In a poem such as “Incident,” which harps on the idea of trauma as something that exists not as a singular event, but rather as a recurring mental state, this repetition highlights the way the mind tends to circle back on certain emotional events, such as the incident described in the poem.