The Speaker

Referring to himself in the first person in the convention of lyric poetry, the speaker is, from what we gather from all the poems in the collection, a poet. Considering the speaker's many metapoetic allusions to the fact that he is the one writing these poems, in addition to his tendency to lend dramatic significance to the act of writing throughout the book, we can assume with some qualifications that the speaker is the creator of these poems. We should not also assume, of course, that the speaker is the author Daniel Borzutsky: the speaker is a persona, a fictional character symbolizing the poet, and poetry-writing in the age of "data fascism." Thus, while the speaker often begins his poems in the first person, he usually submerges his perspective into other characters, or otherwise dissolves himself in fits of schizophrenic incoherence. He begins the book less of...