Hey everybody!!

Following the theme of trauma seen through the event of 9/11 the past few weeks, my ASTU 100 class has been reading a book of poetry titled This Connection of Everyone with Lungs written by Juliana Spahr. It features two poems, one written before 9/11 and one written a year after.

In the first poem, the speaker essentially tells the reader that everything within this world is connected; that whatever pollution or gunk you put up into the air, it will affect someplace else. The speaker does this by continuously using the symbol of a person’s lungs to represent this connection. Like the first poem, the speaker continues weaving the theme of connections  in the second poem, but this time there is no mention of the symbol of lungs. Here the speaker uses the symbol of a person’s skin to relay that connection and whenever the word “skin” is said, it is always used in the context of being with or near another person, hence the connection to others.

One of the things that caught my attention about this book was not the book’s content itself, but the cover. The cover displays a flock of birds midflight and at first I didn’t think much about it, due to the author writing the book in Hawaii at the time and included some tropical scenery into the second poem. But after reading the entire book, I never felt that a book’s cover could provide such contrast to the content held within.

The two poems speak of the connections between people and things; especially the second poem where it speaks heavily on military equipment. The poem written after 9/11 speaks of the connection between the speaker and their lover while in their bed, but also while they are in their bed, they are connected to everything in the world such as deaths of other people, warzones and army weapons. The speaker and lover while in the bed think that they are isolated and having an intimate moment with each other but in fact, they are not isolated as the speaker frequently reminds the reader with reports of deaths for example. No matter how much the speaker wants to have a moment with their lover alone, they technically can’t. While in contrast to this, the cover of the book portrays a flock of birds in the middle of flying.  Birds have long since been the symbol for freedom and in this case I see them as a symbol of being free of all those connections that make us human, from the pollution that will eventually spread across the world and affect all people to the moments of supposed isolation with your lover so you can share an intimate moment to the conflict that is guaranteed to be found in the warzones.

Tell me what you guys think and I hope you all have a wonderful and restful Reading Break!!!

Fiona Tse