There was a lot to wrapped up in Anne Boyer’s Undying: a critique of capitalism, a feminist inraveling of illness, and a profound reflection on being a human being experiencing pain and death and fear in a body. Wren and Allison have both noted how Boyer critiques the way cancer has been represented as a source of epiphany or, more generally, an instrument for reflection in both media and literature as well as by the loved ones of cancer patients. I was struck by Boyer’s reflections on what it means to represent sickness even as the sufferer. As Nayun noted, Boyer said she would “rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as is” (116). Her “fear of turning the pain into a product” reminded me a lot of Agee’s wariness surrounding his own representation of poverty and suffering for an audience who would largely see the piece as entertainment, or as an opportunity to feel informed (134).  I keep coming back to this question or observation because it feels like the central worry in a class on writing for social change. Even Boyer, someone who does not need to worry about telling another’s story from the outside — given that she’s telling her own, that is — tells her story in a language and culture that consumes these stories in perverse and unproductive ways. I think both Boyer and Long Soldier use poetic language as a means of expanding and complicating our notions of narrative. This allows them to break outside of the cultural constraints imposed on writing and storytelling for social change. On 113, Boyer discusses how “what being a writer does to a person is make her a servant of those sensory details” which can be dangerous as “the senses are prone to showing’s lies.” By declaring that “showing is a betrayal of the real, which you can never quite know with your eyes in the first place,” Boyer throws a wrench in our traditional understanding of “good writing” and also of “truth.” To be honest, I’m not completely sure what exactly she means when she discusses the deceptiveness of showing as opposed to telling, but I found this complication to be a good example of the ways in which she expands and complicates the conversation not only about sickness, but about writing and more generally being a person with a body, through the type of language and musing a poet produces best.