Body, Language

Here, Legge says it happens occassionally, when getting ready for a night in the world, that a woman who sees through the needle-eye of poetry will stop, nylons huddled around her ankles, satin caught in the teeth of her shift dress, and want to cry. She might be listening to something emboldening, Nicki Minaj, "Boss Ass Bitch," Liz Phair, "Extraordinary," and she might still drop her dead weight onto her bedspread, and she might be so consumed by this farce that she meets her friends half an hour late, ashamed, having first studied her reflection in every shop window. The way a writer is given the exceptional power to chisel words, not simply to speak them at the pace of passing time; this is how the actions of the woman ensnared in this farce might, when understood generously, be read.