Becca Jensen



The Daughter : The Reader

Becca Jensen currently lives in Saint Louis with her husband. She teaches advanced creative writing at Washington University in Saint Louis, where she serves as the third year fellow in poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Word for/Word, Thermos, and Sawbuck.

about the poem
For a long time I wanted to be a good person, then I gave up. This poem is about the latter half of that sentence—the cruelty and loneliness of it, and ultimately I suppose, its impossibility. It's also about Jonathan Swift. And my twin cousins, who I grew up with and who had a penchant for squeezing tiny things and shrieking "kiss it!" It belongs to a larger series about a family of five—mother, daughter, father, chorus, and abecedarian.


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