Essay Questions

How does the speaker of "Duplex" use imagery to contrast his mother and father?

The speaker of "Duplex" tells us about the trauma he experienced as a child and the differing personalities of his parents. He uses imagery to illustrate the contrast between them, comparing his father to a "hailstorm," and his mother to "light rain." In doing so, he presents his father as being formidable and violent like a hailstorm, while his mother is softer and perhaps more melancholy. As such, the differing temperaments of his parents are depicted, using weather imagery.

Why might have Brown chosen to have the virus as the speaker in his poem "The Virus?"

Brown's poem "The Virus," is told from the perspective of a virus, and is directed towards its host. Overall, this choice of speaker is successful in depicting the seemingly malicious nature of a life-altering disease, personifying it as something that is "out to get," its host. As such, this is an effective way to present the feelings of helplessness and threat a sufferer of a disease might feel from their own body.

In addition to this, by choosing to have the virus as a narrator, Brown emphasizes the vulnerability and passivity of the person who is suffering from the illness and the experience of detachment from a sense of power and control over their own body. In the poem, the host has no voice, and it at the mercy of the speaker.

What is the significance of the form in "Duplex?"

Jericho's poem "Duplex" comprises of seven couplets. Brown himself writes that he decided this form would be called a Duplex, because "something about its repetition and its couplets made me feel like it was a house with two addresses." This is significant, because according to Brown this is a "mutt of a form," and represents how many people in America live within two different identities, and how these different cultural identities live within one person.