Potter is a university writing instructor and fiction writer living in San Francisco. In this essay, Potter shows how Alegría adds up the significant moments in her life to transform her experiences into verse through a series of poetic turns.

Fugues (1993), Claribel Alegría's collection of elegies and love poems, contains the poem "Accounting," a tally of experiences singled out as "electrical instants" in the aging poet's life. As a reviewer commented in Booklist, the collection is "lyrical" and "speaks of the solitary self and the self that is lost and found in love." Likewise, in "Accounting" the poet draws on past experiences in order to gather this self back to the present moment of composition, through which she desires to be transformed. Alegría wants to transmogrify herself "into a verse," to change her form into something surprising and perhaps strange, like...