Prose Poetry and Purposiveness in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women

n 2015, Anne Boyer published Garments Against Women, a collection made up primarily of prose poems. While she had published individual prose poems in earlier collections, this was the first to be almost entirely in this genre. These poems represent something new for Boyer, working with a number of different voices tied to various models of prose writing. Some of the poems play with forms of memoir writing, such as the blog post or the diary entry, and a number of them engage with more formal, interrogative, essay-like, and at times “scientific” models. The voices tied to these prose models are bound together in Boyer’s collection by a self-conscious, interrogative performance of authorship as the site of critique, exposition, and subject formation. This situation results in a challenge for Boyer’s readers. Her poems reach toward the interrogative and expository capacities of prose writing, including forms like the academic and personal essay, while remaining highly suspicious of the social, economic, and biological contexts of those genres and their purposes. The challenge for readers lies in understanding the manner in which this act negotiates an exchange between gestures toward ideas of purposiveness―stylistic and C H R I S T O P H E R O A K E Y