What strikes me most in your reading is how well you track the punctuation as body language — the exclamation marks as physical loudness, the commas as someone who "follows nobody's timetable but their own." That's an insight I'll carry into my own close reading for a while. Dharker's poem performs what it describes: excessive, end-stopped, refusing to be rushed.
The kenning observation around "fatherbrotheruncleson" is beautifully placed. It's a monster made of syllables, and yet she stands outside it — the line break doing exactly the work you describe, deliciously delaying the pun. There's something almost comic about that line, which makes the violence that follows even more shocking.
"Denim and Skulls" is a strong poem, and a worthy companion to Dharker's. It holds its own.
May 15
at
5:51 PM
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