Hong earned her master of fine arts in creative writing at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers and is a writer-in-residence at Richard Hugo House. In the following essay, Hong discusses Muldoon's use of word-shifting, rhyme, and repetition to generate complex associations that delve beneath the surface of apparent meaning.

Like many Muldoon poems, "Pineapples and Pomegranates" is not quite what it first appears to be. The title indicates that the poem's subject is fruit, and the poem begins as a personal anecdote with the speaker recalling his first experience with the pineapple. In the long opening sentence, the speaker muses on the fruit's exotic appeal, its seductiveness to his thirteen-year-old, relatively naive self. However, Muldoon's associations soon lead the reader away from the familiar world of objects to more complex and disturbing issues below the surface of daily life. Muldoon makes this transition from...