Citizen: An American Lyric

The structure of the previous chapters—essay and prose-poetry—loosens in Chapter 5, which is written in a more free-flowing manner. Images, words, scenes, and feelings all meld together here, giving the writing a dream-like quality.

Chapter 5 opens with a meditation on the power of language: “Words work as release—well oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in a neck, the shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink, the conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing” (69). Language has a direct effect on the body. It can inflict bodily harm, which has special meaning for victims of racial slurs: “What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid—what has been duplicated, redacted here, redacted there, altered to hide or disguise—words encoding the bodies they cover” (69). Throughout language’s fluctuations, there is an inevitability and constancy to the body: “And despite everything the body remains” (69).

After the next break, the subject is snapped into a particular time and place: a flashlight enters a darkened room and shines its “blue light” on the body. It is unclear whether the light is real or imagined: “You hold everything black. You give yourself back until nothing’s left but the dissolving blues of metaphor” (70).