Personification: Poems

Personification undertakes dreamlike journeys through crumbling architecture and airless interiors, discovering anachronistic and apocalyptic emblems among the commonplace particulars of modern day life. Breaking open in order to reinhabit the language of Puritan allegory and captivity narrative, these poems meditate on the possibility of personhood generated by the constraints of luminous unknowing, a form of captivity in which one is both bound and held rapt. They proceed by way of detour, boredom’s indirection, and astonished pauses, endlessly seeking “the perfect thought / we slept frozen inside / yet could not see.” Of Personification, Carl Phillips writes, “Here is a strange and arresting vision, indeed.”