Brittany Perham’s second full-length collection, Double Portrait, selected by Claudia Rankine as the winner of the 2016 Barnard Women Poets Prize, is a playful and provocative exploration of relationships. Of course, this central concern is likely evident from Perham’s title; a double portrait does what a good self-portrait does, twice over. However, in addition to capturing each self distinctly, a double portrait also reveals something about the relation between two figures.

To highlight this thematic territory, each poem of Double Portrait is simply titled with the initials “D.P.,” followed by initials and number that don’t, on the surface, seem indicative of much. Such titles are the first clue that this collection skews toward the conceptual. While one can glean a sense of the personal context that sparked Perham to write her poems, they present themselves less as confessions and more as narratives of the poet’s mind as she navigates the difficulties of relationship. In this way, Double Portrait requires a different kind of reading; one tracks less of the biographical particulars that reoccur throughout the poems and more of the psychological particulars such contexts provoke. Taking note of the reoccurring initials that appear in the titles of each section, it becomes apparent that each segment of the book examines a particular kind of relationship made difficult by desire: familial, romantic, sexual, platonic, even civic. Despite drawing this broad portrait, what emerges across the book is a common theme; as Perham puts it in “DP.b.22,” “Wanting is a tricky thing.”

Continually, the speaker in the poems of Double Portrait finds herself struggling with an image of the other and/or their relation that doesn’t quite fit her expectations. For example, in “DP.f.30,” a poem from the section of the book that explores family connections, the speaker reflects on the difficulty of trying to “write poems for the dead,” observing that while writing of the one who has “gone,” “Our painbrain // recalled her, momentarily exactly.” And in this moment, “For a second she was more ours / than she ever really was, entirely ours.” We may believe our memory apprehends the other perfectly, as in a realistic double portrait, but Perham understands such portraits always involve projection, not just on the part of the artist, but of the figures in the portrait themselves. Such projection is especially palpable when one of the sitters for said double portrait is no longer there. Thus, the speaker of “D.P.f.30” admits, “We go on recalling her consciously, inexactly, / to keep her from going again.” While this poem artfully renders the longing that underscores grief, it also gestures toward the tension of interrelation in general; our connections are often rendered difficult because we seek perfect attunement, a mirroring of our desires that the other fulfills. Thus, we look “inexactly” at the other because we look through the lens of our own desire.

As one might glean from the excerpts above, Perham’s poems are often assembled out of simple, even repetitive language, a move that better allows readers to concentrate on the complexities of the content and implications of form. For example, in “D.P.b.01,” a poem in the section that explores romantic and sexual relationships, Perham playfully renders a conversation that will likely be familiar to many readers. One lover asks another, “Will you love me forever?” and waits to hear, “Yes, I will love you forever.” Instead, her lover says “There is no forever” and complains, “You’ll be asking me about forever forever.” This disconnect in the speaker’s desire and her beloved’s perspective is heightened by Perham’s choice to use a ghazal structure; each stanza is a couplet with the second line ending in the word “forever,” a repetition that functions like a beat looking for its perfect echo. However, as Perham’s speaker recognizes her “question about forever” is one

her lover can never answer
even if he tries forever,

even if he tells her, in his own words,
the perfect line ending in “forever,”

because the question she’s asking
she’s asking herself: “Will I love you forever?”

Perham archly teases her speaker, but in so doing reveals the difficulty of desire. In a sense, this poem’s repetition creates a perfect circle where the doubt displayed by the lover, who refuses to pledge his love “forever,” is revealed to be felt by speaker herself; not only does she wish for the lover to reaffirm his desire for her, she needs such reassurance to assuage her own doubt. At the same time, the poem’s repetition has curved the lens of the portrait back onto the speaker, who may also be considering how much of her longing for a “forever” lover results from a lack of self-love, a weak ego that needs another to prop it up. The poem’s structure contains both meanings, a double portrait.

These sorts of playful twists and turns are indicative of Perham’s style, especially in these poems of difficult dyads. A similar example is in “D.P.b.12,” where Perham deftly uses structure to pull at the doubt the speaker feels when she engages in “a Skype conversation” with her lover:

It’s hard to know what’s coming next:
who can say if we’ll be together
when what I want is to lie with you
whether or not either of us is lying

(who can say if we’re in this together?)
sometimes with someone else.

In a sense, Perham’s play with language—here shifting how a reader understands the meaning of lying—is a formal means of underscoring the doubt expressed by the speaker while also highlighting the difficulty of this particular relation, mediated as it is via a screen.

Perham uses this same “slippery” technique to fuse form and content in the section of Double Portrait exploring civic relationships. The showpiece of this section is a long poem, “D.P.wor.99,” which brilliantly uses a fill-in-the-blank form to comment on how we conceive of the “long sentence” of our country and its citizens. The first line of the poem reads “people ____ people ____ people ____ people are people,” followed by a litany of corporations, such as Apple and Google, which Perham writes “should hire ____ people.” One naturally assumes that the ____ should be filled in with various marginalized racial and ethnic groups. However, Perham quickly complicates the reader’s assumption that they have the “correct” answer as the poem interrogates its own ability to speak confidently about ____ people: “in this land ____ people may use certain adj. + noun phrases and ____ people are allowed to follow certain adj. + noun phrases with any combination of verb adverb prepositional phrase direct object indirect object in order to make certain grammatical sentences.” But, “this is not true for ____ people in all lands or for ____ people in this land.” With these lines, Perham teases out the way that ____ people find it easier to make “generalizations” while ____ people find that such “generalizations” become “sentences that last a lifetime.” Meditating on the issue of “responsibility,” Perham turns the lens on to the reader, asking us directly, “how do you see yourself fitting into the phrase ____ people?” As she points out, “____ people have a responsibility” to consider how we navigate this blank space. What difference do our answers make in the various “sentences” people—both ourselves and others—are forced to fill? Essentially, Perham’s fill-in-the-blank poem forces the reader to enact a “sentencing” that most often happens unconsciously, but which has broad, material consequences for people’s lives. Through this effective deployment of form, not only does Perham create a poem that resonates politically, she also draws our attention once again to the difficulty of relating in ways that truly value and accept the other, not for their ability to fill-in-the-blank, but as they uniquely are.

In Double Portrait, Perham awakens us to the charged dynamics of human relation, allowing us to reexamine how we relate to those in our own double portraits. That Perham navigates this thematic territory in formally inventive poems that manage to be both profound and playful is impressive, making Double Portrait a strikingly fresh and worthy read.