Output details

The Son

Prose poetry has become more widely accepted in Britain over the last decade, and has been consistently popular in America. The Son interleaves two poetic forms to produce a deepening sense of a birthmother’s consciousness: “birthmother’s catechisms”, where the same question provokes different answers over time; and “imagined sons”, prose poems in which the birthmother encounters her son once he has come of age. The use of a catechism as a poetic form, in particular one that repeats a single question, is rare if not unique in Anglophone poetry. Its use here, in portraying fictional encounters, blurs the boundary between prose poem and flash fiction, such that Michael Schmidt, the editor of PN Review, which published some of these poems, remarked that singly, the poems operated as flash fictions, while taken together, they became prose poetry. Such innovative genre-blurring puts the work into an international conversation about hybridity