Point of View

The point of view of the collection is largely in the close third person, but shifting to the first person and even second person at times. It is not completely clear who the third person narrator of the poems is, but in many ways the speaker resembles Jackself, and the two are often interchangeable as characters. The collection begins with the third person speaker as if they are telling a story about Jackself, very much in line with the motifs of fable and folklore scattered throughout the book, but eventually the singular first person pronoun begins to creep into the text of the poems in more ways than just dialogue. For example, there is the implicit first person singular in the poem “Jack O’Lantern” as the speaker, undoubtedly Jackself, pens a ballad describing his grief in the wake of Jeremy Wren’s death. This...