Metzger has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature. Metzger teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the University Honors Program. In this essay, Metzger explores the fractured depiction of self in Bogan's "Words for Departure," which she suggests can be read as an icon of the poet's own childhood experiences.

In composing poetry, Bogan used a variety of poetic forms, but the poems in Body of This Death, and the poem that is the subject of this essay, "Words for Departure," are lyric poems, often defined by their emotional response to the grief, chaos, and betrayal associated with love. Bogan writes in her autobiography Journey around My Room that lyric poetry is "the most intense, the most condensed, the most purified form of language," and thus it is to be expected that she would turn to lyric poetry...