Poetry: Assumptions

Overview
Published in 1985, "Assumptions" collects poems that chart intimate and often wrenching encounters with love, loss, identity, and the demands of self-knowledge. The sequence moves between precise lyric statements and longer, narrative or dramatic pieces, creating a layered portrait of a speaker who negotiates public roles and private desires. Concrete details anchor the poems even as they open onto philosophical and moral questions about responsibility, language, and memory.
The collection balances austerity and generosity: the lines are careful and deliberate, the observations clear-eyed, and the emotional range spans ironic coolness to deep tenderness. Recurrent attention to everyday objects, domestic scenes, and moments of travel gives the poems a steady ground from which larger emotional and ethical questions arise.

Themes and motifs
Love and loss recur as core subjects, often treated with a wary intimacy that resists sentimentality. Relationships are examined not merely as events but as matrices of expectation and constraint, where desire collides with cultural and personal "assumptions" about gender, fidelity, and belonging. Grief appears both as private absence and as a social phenomenon that reshapes how identity is narrated.
Identity and self-reflection weave through the poems as both question and method. The speaker frequently interrogates the terms by which she is known , as lover, mother, poet, immigrant, or outsider , and tests language itself as a site of self-construction. Motifs such as mirrors, letters, and domestic appliances recur as metaphors for observation, communication, and the routines that structure life.

Form and technique
Formal craft is a hallmark: metrical play, tight stanzaic forms, and occasional sonnet-like constraints appear alongside free-verse pieces. This formal versatility allows the poems to shift register smoothly from ironic detachment to urgent confession. Precise syntax and carefully weighed line breaks emphasize the tension between restraint and emotional release.
A notable feature is the dialogue between voice and narrative distance. The poems often adopt a speaker who is both present and reflective, able to narrate events while interrogating the language used to tell them. This self-consciousness about form produces work that feels both intellectually rigorous and emotionally immediate.

Voice and tone
The prevailing voice is intelligent, urbane, and morally alert, capable of wit and of intense seriousness. There is an ethic to the diction: words are chosen for clarity and consequence, and emotional moments are earned through accumulation of detail rather than rhetorical flourish. Humor and irony provide relief but rarely permit evasion; the poems return to moral and emotional reckoning.
At times the tone moves from cool observation to elegiac intensity, especially where absence and loss are central. Even in quieter poems, a simmering urgency underlies the lines, as if memory or regret is never far from the surface.

Resonance and significance
"Assumptions" contributes to a poetic voice that combines formal discipline with an insistence on social and personal truth. The collection resonates for readers interested in how intimacy and identity intersect with cultural expectation and linguistic practice. Its attention to craft, narrative, and ethical nuance helps explain why the poems remain spoken of for their precision and humane interrogation.
The work invites rereading: details that seem incidental on a first pass often reveal ethical or emotional fulcrums on closer inspection. The overall effect is of a body of poems that rewards attention, offering both technical mastery and ongoing questions about how people live, love, and reckon with themselves.