Emma Harding > Recent Status Updates

I already know this is a book I need to reread a myriad of times in order to understand all of the nuances and the forms completely.

The review "Koh remarkably and beautifully translates the language of the mothers as the language of survivors" makes a lot of sense now.

I just finished chapter two, and I'm tearing up.

"I am the Body" lacks energy due to the various metaphors applied and their lack of expansion. The lack of connection between them may reflect the lack of connection the speaker has to their body and how the transformation process is jagged intself. However, in terms of comprehension, the same effect could have taken place within one metaphor. This would allow the reader to follow along a little easier.

Since my last checkpoint, I've found the poems to be more relatable, but occasionally, there appears to be inconsistent punctuation. I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but it can be distracting. It's complementing the inconsistency between the internal and external experience of the transgender speaker.

Given that more of the poems seem to be trans-centered as I read more of the book, I'm having some difficulty relating to the poems as a cis-gendered woman. Occasionally, I recognize what the struggle is, but how the speaker survives is sometimes lost on me.

So far, this poetry collection is from the perspective of a transgender woman who is surviving in her body. Survival (mentally and socially) and addressing the body as a whole are huge themes.

In this previous section, I noticed a theme on ecological prayer not so much as a religious act but as a plea or hope that someone or something will return. I found some of the verbs, like "caressing," a little repetative, but the juxtapositions and imagery were refreshing.

The second section covers romantic love, briefly adding moments of gay love, and how this romantic love intersects with natural history.

The first section does a good job building a tense and suspenseful coming-out narrative through poetry.

I wish there was a notes section. There are some ideas that don't quite make sense to me as a reader. I can't tell if things like "Yo, Adrien" is an inside joke or reference to the movie "Rocky."

"When Pubic Becomes Public" takes the elements of the painting and combines them with others to make new descriptors. As an ekphrastic poem of Tome Wesselman's "Great American Nude #57," Vines takes the daffodils in a vase and uses them as a descriptor for the woman's demi-bob hair (ex., "daffodil demi-bob"). This imagery connects the subject with their environment and demonstrate the poem's semi-independence.

Just stopped on "Everything in Our World Did Not Seem to Fit." So far, I'm pretty sure I like the first section of the book better than the second. The first comes across as lighter and more relatable.

It's interesting how part I. poems only have one stanza and part II. poems are all couplets.

I'm not sure how to interpret these poems other than images. It's as if they're incomplete or unrefined thoughts of the scene(s) around them.