Clifton is the speaker in these poems, looking back from the not-so-far future and attempting to make sense of what has happened. The manuscript follows the speaker’s journey as she questions the role of the artist and wrestles with collective grief. Clifton’s poetry plumbs the depths of human emotion, reflecting the despair of the firemen’s ascent into hell and the ecstasy of a new granddaughter’s birth, never shying away from intensity in her lean, powerful diction. Enjambment functions as a form of punctuation, emphasizing and reframing words and phrases to create new meaning through form. Guided by W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, she questions how this tragedy relates to the tragedies African Americans have faced in this country. These injustices loom, hard-to-ignore cracks in the façade of American nationalism used to galvanize the American people in the wake of the tragedies.

Clifton typed these poems on a typewriter before sending them off, and they first appeared in their typewritten form. The use of a typewriter is not novel in the year 2001; Clifton was typewriting her poems for decades prior, and only half of American households had a personal computer.