You may have seen this one already – it made the rounds this week. Lisa Catherine Harper reads herself through her ex’s collection of poems in “Poems from My Ex“:
Clearly, this woman had her roots in me, but she had morphed, under the pressure of image, under the compression of language, across the controlled span of line, the form of the quatrain, even the interruptive power of the dash that made John’s lines hurtle toward meaning.
It’s quite a nice piece. She moves through the poems and their transmogrified versions of herself and her experiences to a sense that this woman “was an image, something made (and made true) by the poem.” That may not be a particularly inventive conclusion, but it’s worth reading to see the way she gets there. The poet is John Hennessy, and his book is Bridge and Tunnel. You can read one of the poems Harper discusses here.
This post may contain affiliate links.
