Aubrey holds a PhD in English and has published many articles on contemporary poetry. In the following essay, Aubrey discusses the literary allusions in Sajé's poem.

Sajé is an engaging young poet who does unusual and unexpected things in her poems. Like “The Art of the Novel,” many of the poems in her collection Bend contain literary or philosophical allusions that add extra layers of meaning or are simply used playfully by the poet. In “Marcel at the Station House,” for example, Sajé imagines the French novelist Marcel Proust being questioned by the police about a crime he did not commit and giving some delightfully oblique, Proust-like answers. “Seven Types of Ambiguity” is a reference to a well-known—at least to students of literature—book of that title written in 1930 by the literary critic William Empson. The title of the poem is no...