In Lee Young-ju’s “A Girl and the Moon” from her collection Cold Candies (Black Ocean, 2021), translated from the Korean by Jae Kim, image and story are woven together into a spellbinding prose poem that maintains its steady rhythm through the consistent use of commas. “Mid-night, swinging upside down on a pull-up bar, the girl says, Mother, this bone growing on my back, white in the night, protruding out of my skin, long and endlessly this bone,” writes Young-ju. This week, write a poem that uses commas as its only punctuation. Does this formal constraint challenge your syntax and word choice?
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