Summary

In “Dream Song #17,” the speaker offers a condensed vision of what he describes as something like “a lullaby / for the end of the world” (30). Midway through the poem he doubles back on this statement, and argues that the poem isn’t really a lullaby for the end of the world; it is closer to “the beginning / what happens when we start to rot / in the daylight” (31). Life and death, beginnings and endings, collapse into each other by the end of the speaker’s dream song.

The speaker brings us back to earth in the following poem, “The Privatized World.” He awakes from the dream song to harsh, concrete reality, and continues the pattern set by the opening poems of the collection by grounding his political critique in specific border crossing tragedies: “Are you haunted by the voices of the immigrants who / suffocated in...