The author's deftly woven book-length poem questions the existence of universal individual rights such as speech and citizenship, especially in relation to borders--both national and linguistic.stic.
Comfortable neither with the self who is made entirely through autonomy or genealogy, SPEECH tracks the western-world idea of freedom, asking whether the person who believes they can say and write whatever they want is more free or less aware of the nature of free speech as a right everywhere. Formally, SPEECH invokes the action of walking and weaving: enjambed lines that accrue, building pages vertically through repetition of sound, syntax, and metrical patterning. In the book, a woman walks, threading her way through a cityscape that overlays west and east, here and there, past and present, self and other, creating a place and person neither and both.