Point of View

Laméris’s poem “Leg” is told through a first-person point of view. Readers should not automatically assume that a speaker fully represents the poet, though speakers can encompass a particular tone or experience belonging to the poet. Laméris often shares in interviews that she uses the materials of her own life to write poems. That being said, the speaker in “Leg” can also be read as separate from Laméris. Regardless, the speaker includes plenty of personal and intimate details such as her definition of sisterhood, her brother’s death, and her sister-in-law’s cancer.

After coming upon a dismembered deer leg, the speaker contemplates the notions of mortality and sisterhood. She uses both direct observation and her imagination to draw connections between seemingly disparate things. For example, the speaker discovers that she feels a sense of sisterhood with both the doe and...