Really amazing use of extended metaphor. And really I'd call it more of an entwined metaphor. The brain represents the landscape. The landscape represents the brain. And I love how it doesn't explain itself, it just trusts the reader to go with it. Copper Nickel at its best!
Took my breath. How the poet doesn't let go of the metaphor, making it strike louder on each line.
Really amazing use of extended metaphor. And really I'd call it more of an entwined metaphor. The brain represents the landscape. The landscape represents the brain. And I love how it doesn't explain itself, it just trusts the reader to go with it. Copper Nickel at its best!
This is such an insightful analysis--I love "entwined metaphor." Thank you for sharing your thoughts, T R!
This poem feels like holding a mirror to the mind and finding a nation inside it.
The MRI becomes a map of America, lobes glimmering like towns, rivers of dopamine flowing unseen.
Love hardens into stone, while pleasure and greed scatter debris Diet Pepsi cans, syringes, broken dreams.
The speaker’s brain is a restless country: truckers hauling Oreos past rehab centers, rage echoing in its streets.
Stolen lands and silos remind us that history itself is carved into the tissue of thought.
Flood and drought coexist, abundance and scarcity pulsing through psyche and soil alike.
The brain manufactures sensations smoke, dirt, taste but also war machines, cranes, and wreckage.
Yet amid destruction, a church steeple rises, fragile symbol of hope or illusion.
America here is not geography but a divided cell, vast sky arguing with pain and sweetness.
Ultimately, the poem insists that identity and nation are inseparable, both crumbling and luminous at once.
Brilliant!! "ghost grey gelatin? "leafy gas pumps"? "trucks hauling oranges and Oreos?" "salt block and soybean feld." Really brilliant!
So glad you enjoyed this poem, Gary!
Impossible not to! G