Point of View

“The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled” is told through the first-person perspective of a speaker who reflects on her younger self. The present-day speaker’s awareness colors the poem as a whole, showing that she is aware of how her travels have changed her. When the speaker first began backpacking, she was awed at having found a “kind of destiny” as well as “how / to live” (12 and 5-6). The older speaker is aware that she is not the first to travel in order to discover more about the world and herself. Plenty of other people before her have treaded this “beaten track” (6). However, this does not lessen the impact that the speaker’s travels had on her life.

Over the course of the poem, the speaker reflects on her choices and where they led her. While facing routine evictions, she goes through her belongings and...