Perhaps the most dominant tool used in achieving this stratification is repetition: it takes on the function of form in a collection of texts that are, with a handful of notable exceptions, entirely prose poems. The repetitive phrases take on a grounding effect for readers as they make their way through the poems. In “A Poem,” the speaker asserts that “The intensity of the instance burns. For it has to turn into another instance. There is nobility in asking the same thing over and over” (p. 43). Repetition can thus be seen as a phoenix that rises again as another bird, in another place, for another purpose. And the tone here is at the same time serious — the speaker is calling attention her continuous repetition and asserting its importance — and humorous, poking fun at herself a little bit, as if to say “I know I’m repeating myself a lot. Well, it’s noble!” Throughout the collection, she does not take herself, or her subject matter, too seriously — despite the fact that she tackles such hefty issues as her parents’ difficult marriage, the sense of loss and exile, and her Catholic faith.

The poems that bookend the collection touch on these issues in a repetitious drumbeat of sentences beginning with “They…” Here is an excerpt from the opening poem “na no la,” which I quote rather lengthily to capture the rhythm and feel of the language and the fluid rapidity of staccato allusions to painful memories and embedded Biblical language:

Note that the sentences which do not begin with “They come” or even “They” function the same way as prosodic elements such as caesuras, startling enjambment, and stanza breaks do in a lineated poem: they give the reader a chance to take a breath, prevent the poem from becoming monotonous, and take the reader by surprise. Repetition provides the structure which creates these “prosodic” elements as much as meter or regular line/stanza lengths provide the structure for lineated poems.

Throughout the book the speaker herself makes statements and poses questions about what repetition is. The poem titled:

begins with the question “Is repetition a repression?” and two phrases which are repeated throughout the collection: “Do you see a mulberry tree in a mustard seed? What illness springs from the lost place?” The former question is, of course, a Biblical reference, and the latter a reference to her expatriation: both are indicative of subject matter that is deeply personal and easily repressed, only to resurface again and again. She speaks to this later in the poem, as well, asserting that “Repetition is virginal. Mnemosyne. Before we forgot what we knew we have to recover what we have forgotten” (p. 40). And in the earlier poem, which has perhaps one of the best poem titles I’ve ever heard:

she asserts that “Repetition is innovation. Repetition is an” (p.7). This is one of many unfinished sentences throughout the collection, left hanging as if completing it would be at cross-purpose to expressing its meaning. No word, either Polish or English, can connote the open-ended meaning which only the lack of a word in that particular instance can. Another instance of this is seen in the poem, “annunciation of light,” which begins: