Images of Mutilation

In the first poem of the book, we learn that for the speaker "it is hard to move in a body so congested with images of mutilation" (Let Light Shine Out of Darkness," 12). This introduces us to perhaps the text's most recurrent and dominant motif: images of the mutilated body. In the context of "The Performance of Becoming Human" "mutilation" translates into radical separation of part from whole. Borzutsky tends to orchestrate this theme under the formal conditions of distorted synecdoche, where the body's isolated parts relate not to an organic whole, but to the body of the nation-state.

This large scale assault on synecdoche manifests itself in nearly every poem in the collection, and on multiple imagistic levels. On the lowest level, we see simple body parts acting on their own accord, under no influence or direction from a body that now stands...