Only Through The Body

The poems in this collection attempt to engage the speaker’s own geography of intersecting social locators/identity markers and attempts to produce a means of transforming their own intersecting social borders and identities for both the speaker and the reader. To do so, the poems begin by drawing personal “frame of reference” maps using select coordinates that can be found in the true stories, in the case of Janay and Ray Rice and in the persona poem “On 171st Street in Jamaica, Queens at 5:15 a.m.*”, and in the other speaker’s stories as well to find the bordered relationships between themselves, the objects, people, places and experiences. Based on the construction of maps related to gender, race violence and sexuality the reader is invited to explore the dialectical interrelationships between them and the poem.