Point of View

The author largely uses first person perspective, although a few poems, like “Of Course She Looked Back,” and “The Last Mojave Indian Barbie,” are written in third person. Of these examples, “Of Course She Looked Back” uses the third person point of view to talk about a universal human experience rather than an individual experience. “Of Course She Looked Back” discusses one of the fundamental tragedies of human nature, which is the tendency of people to hurt themselves for the sake of their own curiosity. In “Of Course She Looked Back,” the impact would be lessened if a first person point of view implied that the poem was the experience of one individual.

However, the third-person point of view in “The Last Mojave Indian Barbie,” adds a sense of emotional distance from what is clearly the individual experience of a specific speaker. The speaker of...