Point of View

Borzutsky consistently writes in the first person throughout the book, in the convention of lyric poetry. That being said, when it comes to point of view Borzutsky's approach to the lyric is far from conventional. First off, the speaker repeatedly calls attention to himself as the poet writing these poems. This meta-reflexive tendency ironizes the speaker's perspective. Whether this ironic self-awareness works to increase trust in the reader--we can trust the speaker, considering his honesty--or to question the veracity of his poetic critique, depends on the reader's own temperament; it likely oscillates between trust and mistrust. Secondly, the speaker consistently merges his first person perspective into the perspective of other characters without warning. This merging further dislocates the reader in terms of our ability to identify where, exactly, the first person point of view is coming from. In psychoanalytic terms, one could reasonably categorize the...