Communal Sight: Attack of the Body Snatchers!

Have you ever seen that movie? It inspired you to poetry immediately, right? No? Well, maybe I'm a little different. Anyways, “Communal Sight” is a collection of eleven poems, most of them written in response to an Honors class I took called “America: Site Under Construction.” During our discussion of American history in this class, we watched The Attack of the Body-Snatchers and discussed its relationship to the Communist scares of the 1950s, especially the loss of trust in societal structures.

            In reflecting on our class discussion and this movie, I started thinking about the emotional impact of damaged trust, which extends beyond this particular time period. Part of what, to me, makes the movie so horrific is the transformation of and betrayal of intimates; mother and son, close friends, lovers, etc. However, this emotional destruction continues today whenever a trusted person betrays another.

In these poems, I’ve tried to express these and other related ideas; the impossibility of really “knowing” a person, contradictions in how people see each other, the emotional betrayal, and the loss of foundations for trust and community.

I'll be posting the poems one at a time over the next 11 weeks.