Poem-A-Day: Self-Portrait in a Wire Jacket by Monica Youn

Self-Portrait in a Wire Jacket by Monica Youn     To section off  is to intensify,  to deaden.  Some surfaces cannot be salvaged. Leave them  to lose function,  to persist only as armature, holding in place those radiant  squares of sensation-- the body a dichotomy of flesh and  blood. Wait here in the trellised garden you  are becoming. Soon you'll know  that the strictures have themselves  become superfluous, but at that point you'll also know that ungridded you could no longer survive.     Copyright © 2013 by Monica Youn. Used with permission of the author.   About This Poem "The wire jacket was a Boxer Rebellion-era Chinese torture device that was used to administer the infamous 'death by a thousand cuts.' I encountered its description in Sax Rohmer's The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu, which I was reading as part of a project on Western representations of Asian culture. More abstractly, for me the wire jacket represented the consequences of living for too long under a system of constraint--how adaptation can involve an irrevocable, though self-imposed, loss of freedom."    --Monica Youn Most Recent Book by Youn Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010) August 8, 2013 Monica Youn's second and most recent book of poems is Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Youn lives in Manhattan, where she works as a lawyer. Related Poems Ghost in the Land of Skeletons by Christopher Kennedy After tagging the dust your body is made of by Jen Tynes The Tongue by Chris Martin Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the  Poem-A-Day Archive.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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