Lyric Indifference and the Genre of the Person

This paper reads Jackqueline Frost’s Young Americans and Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother as cases of indifference to and within lyric norms. This indifference is understood as a moment of relief from the identitarian specificity of apostrophic conventions. In Frost’s poetics, indifference is figured as a refusal of the assumption of personhood as the basis of politics. The limits and ironies of this poetics are traced in Vuong’s lyric sequences, where every body’s specificity, and every poem’s singularity, offer a way out from what Virginia Jackson has described as “the genre of the person”, with which the overdetermination of lyric reading has reified difference.