Point of View

The majority of the poems in this collection are told from the point of view of a variety of first-person narrators. The use of the first-person narration gives the reader a personal connection with each of these narrators as they tell their part of Shepard’s story. The narrators include inanimate objects. For instance, the poem “The Truck” is narrated by the truck into which McKinney and Henderson lured Shepard. The truck is recorded as if it were a person with a voice: “I confess: / I was wildly driven / I took a wrong turn” (8). Other inanimate narrators include the road, the fence, the stars, the moon, and the deer. The poems also capture the voices of people involved in Shepard’s story ranging from the boys who beat him so badly to the mountain bike rider who found Shepard and the judge who later presided...