Donna Stonecipher’s “Model City”

I am partial to sentences with this framework: “There are two kinds of [ ]: those who [ ], and those who [ ].” The setup should, ideally, involve a chiasmus or double entendre or any florid rhetorical device that offsets the blatant generalization being made. The best of such sentences are aware of their blatant generalizations but strive for truth anyway, recklessly. That’s the last line of this recording. Stonecipher’s syntactical attempt to polarize the past and future sinks as it tries to swim, for she—or the general truth of life—has already convinced us that the past, present, and future are in flux.

Read the full poem in our Summer 2013 issue.