“Greedy-eye, don’t look to me,” she writes in the last stanza of “Chupacabra,” a persona poem of the Latin American cryptid. Even though we understand the dramatic situation — the beast is speaking to the farmers who are, to avenge the death of their animals, gathering a search party to hunt for the beast — our understanding is blurred, complicated because the imperative seems so pertinent an instruction to us. We could easily be the “Greedy-eye” and the “I” of the poem could easily be the poet, the cryptid rumored to roam the wilds of the poem.

But let’s not overread Beeder’s intentions. All poets (I hope) are aware that the poem is never the thing it claims to be — an “Anatomy Lesson,” a list of the play’s dramatis personae, a photograph, or a letter — and while it may enact features of those things, it will always be a poem in much the same way that Copland’s “El Salón México” affects aspects of Mexican folk songs though it can never be a folk song because of its orchestration, its audience, and the composers intention of immolation. We know Proteus as the mythic shape-shifter and yet, throughout his forms, he was still Proteus, a sea god. Beeder’s voice even as it shapeshifts is still a poet. “Eyewitness” begins with “Dear Sister,” identifying itself with a letter; it ends, however, in something that works literally as an ending to a letter and as an address to the poet or reader:

The word “Write” vibrates a sympathetic string with Bishop’s “(Write it!)” insertion in “One Art,” and inherently insists ars poetica, the craft.

It’s no surprise then, given Beeder’s maneuverings between a poem’s dimensions of the literal and metaphorical, that language becomes both image and subject. Three letter poems in the collection — “X,” “H,” and “>(D)” — form a kind of a redacted abecediary for adults. Equal parts morphology, etymology, and personification, the troika becomes an investigation into how language carries and subverts meaning, as in “X”: