I feel as if Long Soldier stresses in the importance of spoken word throughout the entire book; one poem that I was stuck on for a while was Vaporative, where in one of the sections she states that writing was only important to the author’s memory, and not to anyone else. This is followed by a definition of the word opaque just from how it sounds. The idea that words precede speaking and that hierarchy feels like it is being attacked constantly. Long Soldier even mentions in the Introduction of the Whereas section that “President Obama never read the Apology aloud, publically” which leads me to believe that one particular source of tension was this importance of the written word, which then only makes the various edits like the use of strikethrough even more powerful. In addition, on page 92 she states that there is no word for apologize, but there are actions, which the resolution doesn’t have a clear counterpart. For me, reading 38 was jarring both because of its straight-forwardness in telling the reader exactly what was being done with stylistic choices but also because it felt like every poem preceding had a place in setting it up. Lines like “everything is in the language we use”, “there’s irony in their poem”, and “‘real’ poems do not ‘really’ require words” just makes this particular poem feel like one giant condemnation of the use of written language, which maybe was the point.