Molly McArdle

One of my favorite sections from Prelude to Bruise is its titular poem—a work full of mouthy alliteration and assonance: “Good boy. / Black boy, blue-black boy. / Bad boy—rap rap.” It is about the moment before you get hurt; a moment in which you know you will be hurt; a moment in which you are good and bad (or so the speaker says); bruised, burning, broken. It’s disturbing and beautiful, which is also a good way to describe its subject matter: a heady mixture of sex and violence and power. But its final line, “Begin again, bend,” tilts the meaning. Living things that bend, as Aesop famously has it, do not break: they survive.