Chaos and Order

Puberty is a chaotic time, full of powerful and new emotions, bodily changes, and self-reflection. "The Boy" describes someone in the midst of such changes, which include a budding awareness of the boy's sexuality and cultural identity. The boy, however, is also in someone else, who is similarly questioning her identity, testing the limits of her own self-reflection. The "twinning" of these two personas creates a challenging poem for readers, especially beginning poetry readers, to comprehend. One device that helps readers is the order of the poem—the regular meter and consistent rhyme scheme. The form of the poem helps shape and contain the whorl of changing pronouns, the movement between imagined selves, and offers readers a way to consider their own relationship to the outside world and to their own identities.

Writing

Hacker demonstrates the power of writing to do more than simply record the...