She could feel the whispers in her chest, could hear them in her mind. When she was a child, before the war, before the river, her parents spoke to each other in Yiddish, a language they didn’t share with her. This was how the river felt to her—a language that soothed her, a constant presence, but one she barely understood.

The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it.

Language is a blueprint for culture. We put ourselves into our words, from grocery lists to theorems. Needs are certainly encoded into language, but beyond those needs we see that imagination itself is just as much encoded into language, and different cultures have different languages. How is this possible? It suggests that imagination is dynamic,

But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely?