First Want

Abstract

First Want begins with this hungry eye and expands outward, circling around questions of desire and convention, gender roles and expectations, perception, the domestic, sexuality, and performance versus authentic experience. In this coming-of-age story, the poems oscillate between the past and present as the speaker examines memories, popular culture, and her own interiority, trying to trace the origins of her own becoming and alter the trajectory of her future. The collection highlights a chorus of women’s voices: women in art, both living and dead; divorced mothers; teachers; Pilates instructors; waitresses and café patrons; women with engagement rings and women with bare fingers; and the many echoes inside the speaker’s head as she wrestles with her own shifting, and often conflicting, desires. While the speaker absorbs this chorus of voices and interacts with them, in turn, it is her voice that drives the collection forward as she adjusts and transforms, reckoning with the past to more fully understand the present and step into her own power.