Reviews | April 22, 2026

“A Supposed Person”: Self, Identity, and the Confessional Question in Three Recent Collections of Poetry   

The Sweating Sickness by Rebecca Lehmann. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025, 96 pp., $20.00 (paperback) 

Brutal Companion by Ruben Quesada. Barrow Street, 2024, 94 pp., $18.00 (paperback) 

My Heresies by Alina Stefanescu. Sarabande Books, year, 110 pp., $17.95 (paperback) 

When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse –  

it does not mean – me – but a supposed person. 

–Emily Dickinson in a July 1862 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson 

According to the poet and critic David Lucas, there is an “illusion of personal encounter in the language of a poem”; it seems as if we’re engaging with the real self of the poet when we read their work. This idea has held sway in American poetry arguably at least since the arrival of the loose grouping of mid–twentieth-century writers who became known as the confessional poets. In a now infamous discussion of Sylvia Plath’s poetry in which the term “confessional poetry” was first used, Irving Howe wrote that the “confessional poem would seem to be one in which the writer speaks to the reader, telling him, without the mediating presence of an imagined event or persona, something about his life,” suggesting that confessional poetry provides us with almost direct access to the life—or self—of the person who wrote the poems, and that its power derives from this identification. The Language poets in the late twentieth century mounted a critique of this notion of seeing the poet’s own naked self in the poetry, arguing instead that the “self” is constructed in and through language and, insofar as it exists, it does so as a kind of epiphenomenon that occurs in the perception of a self in language by the reader, rather than existing independently of and prior to its expression in language: that is, in the words of Emily Dickinson, the self is a “supposed person.” 

The “types” of selves discussed in this review include a white American wife and mother (Rebecca Lehmann) who interrogates what happens to the self when, on the one hand, that self is complicated by parenting, miscarriage, and abortion and shattered on the other hand by the suicide of an abusive former lover; a queer, Latinx poet (Ruben Quesada) who struggles with the stigma of homosexuality and race in a white, patriarchal society; and a “Romanian-Alabamian” poet (Alina Stefanescu) who probes the complexities of selfhood in the context of losing a homeland and immigrating to America.