Accretion is a helpful term reading a poem like Lee’s Poisonwell Diaries: Psalms of the Ossuary. Just to keep track of Lee’s body in this poem—it’s everywhere. Her body is being told what it is by someone who may or may not have a vested interest in understanding who she is. But their proximity to her body makes them an expert on what their body tells them about her. On a table. At an examination. Her body is looked at. Looked at closer. The looking is circuitous. It mainly serves the looker’s interest. The poet is that part of her mom her mom recognizes so she needs to tell her what to do about her body. Because the mother had done something with her body. Or had had something done to her body.
The poem is about so much telling about what happens to a body, what she hears about her body, like Shanta Lee is kind of part of the body and she’s kind of sharing with this man what he feels like seeing her body. All these bodies populating each section. Something appears to have happened to this body, prompting an examination. And what if that was the poetic form: examination. The results of many examinations. And the poet’s sensation of being examined.
Accretion is a helpful term reading a poem like this. Because the sections are brief, just glimpses, but there’s something common enough among them that a reader might be like, “I see that.” when they start reading. Then, because of accretion, about halfway through they’ll be like, “I SEE that.” Because there are so many ways race and womanhood register in the poem. And they don’t just register one way, and they aren’t so separate from one another when they’re appearing, the poem might be saying.