In these two poems, Ginny Threefoot is ostensibly measuring ambiguities—of sound, of childhood. What is really happening, however, is that Threefoot is keying her perceptual sensitivities to the “sound of /seeking what is hiding” and thus the quotidian shivers with new potency and potential. The subject(s) in these poems bear the vulnerability of being a child—that is, one for whom selfhood is still an unfolding project. Against the forces that would suppress that unfolding (shh, shut), Threefoot opposes the ingenuity of seeking, the “sound of/the self.” In the subtle susurrus of a breeze among trees, amid the murk of the water’s surface, caught in the complexities of family, Threefoot works her transformations. “Where is a person to go?” she asks. There is no answer, only witness. Time’s Mobius Strip in continuous movement: “now I am/then I was.”
Read “ambiguities of sound” by Ginny Threefoot >>
Read “ambiguities of childhood” by Ginny Threefoot >>