In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 264.
Writing, to borrow from Louis Gluck’s essay in Proofs and Theories (Ecco Press, 1994), isn’t a decanting of personality. We can’t trap our rants in jars. In other words, anger has to go somewhere, and we have to try to be ethical in how we express it. For the sake of this piece, we’ll consider “ethical anger” as that which is justifiable, especially when the subject is in an elevated place of power in relation to the speaker. When I say the anger has to “go somewhere,” I mean it has to be transformed. So, how do we do this in our poems?
One way through is metaphor. Metaphor, by traditional definition, is to see one thing in terms of another. In a craft class, however, Marie Howe explained that metaphor is a means of achieving a new realization or spiritual insight.
Tiana Clark’s poem “BBHMM” presents a compelling example of righteous anger provoking a metaphorical shift in consciousness, leading the speaker to figuratively “birth” a new realization.
The speaker builds up to the realization that, as a woman of color of child-bearing age, she is expected by everyone, including her doctor, to transact her body into submission, to wait for others to tell her what to do with it.
As she describes undergoing a pelvic exam, she states: “Even now, I’m paying for my doctor / to reach and scrape inside me… / She tells me I need to start thinking about babies / because of my age I think, Bitch… I’m not ready.”
The reaction is understandable; the speaker is forced into a passive role, physically in the stirrups and psychologically with the societal expectation of motherhood. Moreover, the narrator has to “pay” for the pressure to reproduce in the literal and emotional sense, well beyond the doctor’s office.
The poem also engages metaphorical reproduction as the speaker recounts a boy who, “said, suck it, bitch with his heavy, dense hand / at the back of my head pushing. Pushing is / another way to mean pay what you owe me. I didn’t forget.”
The boy “pushing” evokes labor, symbolizing the speaker’s painful realization. She remembers not just the boy pushing her head, but also the doctor pushing her into having children, and the unjust world pushing her into silence. With the poem, she is pushing back, forging a new consciousness.
Her final “push” is toward her realization, “I am forever in the wettest red.” The speaker has given birth to both a painful insight and a renewed sense of power and awareness. She alludes to the unfairness of a white, patriarchal, capitalist system and recognizes that, particularly for women of color, everything comes with a price, but she refuses to negotiate her value, even if it comes with a debt that isn’t hers to pay.
Anger is propulsive, and if you are intentional, you can let it fuel your writing.
Maria Nazos grew up in Athens, Greece, and Joliet, Illinois. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, TriQuarterly, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collection Pulse (Omnidawn, 2026) and the translator of the poetry collection The Slow Horizon That Breathes (World Poetry Books, 2023) by Dimitra Kotoula, longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award. Maria has worked almost every job, including as a whale-watching boat attendant, table dancer, teacher, barista, sunglasses salesperson, bartender, and, arguably, the worst waitress in the entire history of the Eastern seaboard. If she spilled Pinot Noir on you, she would like to apologize.
image credit: Fern M. Lomibao