Point of View

There are several important points to note in relation to the various aspects of point of view in the collection. The first has to do with voice. The collection’s first three parts each contain several poems in which the point of view is that of a first person speaker, or narrator. While the remainder lack the pronoun type (“i / me / we / our”) to specifically identify a first person perspective, there is the clear sense that even without that language, the voice of those poems can be connected to that of the speaker of the first-person poems.

A second, and related, point has to do with the more specific identity of the speaker. In the book’s first three parts, that identity can generally be defined, in broad terms, as female; as a survivor of childhood sexual interference; and as someone struggling to shape a...