Summary

In “Eat Nothing,” the speaker takes up the familiar subject of the body’s self-alienation, but locates the site of this self-alienation in an intimate scene, set at a doctor’s checkup. We learn that clinical practice has little to do with healing, that the body’s clinical compartmentalization is “a certain type of fiscal strategy.” (48) The speaker subtly likens the relation between patient and doctor, and concomitantly, between citizen and authoritative body, to an abusive romantic relationship, an analogy made explicit in the poem’s concluding lines: “My love, says the authoritative body, you must realize that if I / slice off your hand in an act of ungovernable aggression it / doesn’t mean that I don’t love you.” (49).

In “The Privatized Waters of Dawn,” Borzutsky continues to develop the collection’s larger themes on a more intimate level. The poem begins...