Donnelly is a poet, editor, and teacher. His first book of poems titled The Charge was published by the Ausable Press in 2003. In this essay, Donnelly demonstrates that Dunn's poem is a mix of two distinct modes of poetry.

In a March 2000 interview with Philip Dacey for the online journal the Cortland Review, Dunn said: "I've been refining how to write the poem of mind. I've tried for a poem of clear surfaces in service, I hope, of the elusive, the difficult to say." The poem "The Reverse Side" seems to be the perfect illustration of the goals Dunn describes in this statement. That is, it can be demonstrated that "The Reverse Side" is (primarily) a "poem of mind" with "clear surfaces" which takes up as one of its main subjects the "difficult to say." It is helpful to examine each of these three qualities in turn...