Lean Year

Abstract

Lean Year is an exploration of precarity, violence, and protest through the form of the lyric poem. The primary voice of the poetry collection draws the reader through the image-laden landscape of her childhood, marriage, and death. The narrator of Lean Year navigates the interplay between the imposition of parameters onto her life and her own resistance against those parameters. Lean Year relies heavily on the tangible and symbolic import of the image in constructing for the collection’s speaker an inner life that transcends the bounds of her context. The enmeshment of interior life with the cadence of the natural world becomes a vehicle for Lean Year’s speaker to assert her subjective experience, even under circumstances that do not otherwise accord her a voice.