Point of View

“Black Coffee Blues” is told through several perspective lenses, incorporating elements of first, second, and fourth-person narrative. The first stanza uses the second-person “you”, and creates an immersive sense of building the scene around the reader: “Even if you never drank black coffee, that won’t stop you from drinking in the feelings that filter across a room” (1.1). Later, however, it uses the fourth-person us: “These are the questions Sarah asked us to think about” (4.4). Finally, the closing stanza incorporates direct address, which imply that a first-person narrator is speaking to the reader: “Drink up. Talk to the shadows” (4.5, 6). The combination of these narrative approaches create a dream-like surrealism within the poem, inviting the reader into conversation.

Language and Meaning

As a prose poem, the language in “Black Coffee Blues” is direct and colloquial, which reflects its mundane backdrop. It begins “in medias res”, or...