DDCPoetry

 Analysis found here:  https://ddcpoetry.blogspot.com/2013/02/analysis-of-reader-by-rita-mae-reese.html I was looking her up and found this bio of her on Poetry Foundation .  Her quote on Anti- got my attention: I'm against poems that aren't against anything. Poems that only have one mind (or fewer). Poems that go in one direction only. I'm even more against poems that go very slowly in one direction. I'm against poetry that's never smoked, can't take a joke and can't remember my name. When I was rereading her poem, "Dear Reader," I kept the statement, "can't remember my name" in mind because I think I missed something in my original analysis of the poem. The poem is also pretty straight forward narrative about caring for someone that's slowly losing their mind -- perhaps dementia which, weirdly enough, is also a poem with one mind or rather one complete mind that can comprehend things, the speaker's perspective. And that...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Dear Reader" by Rita Mae Reese Originally Read: November 29, 2012 (Maybe) More information about the Poet:  Rita Mae Reese   When reading this over again I was thinking about the comments I made about the the tone.  I think the tone is really well done here.   First, the speaker is the nurse taking care of an elderly person who forgets.  I thought the elderly person was a man throughout the poem, but it can be an elderly woman because I don't see any indication of gender, and the same could be said about the nurse (I think it's a woman, but there's no specific gender in the poem).  I won't get into that.  Sexist reinforcing gender tropes.  Let's just move on, shall we? Anyway, the tone, dispassionate, morbidly humorous tone in the second stanza spoken from the outsider -- the nurse -- offsets the "sentimentality" in stanza three, "she is / eveything--you gave / me a shake--everything / to me." The l...