No Matter The Wreckage Sarah Kay Summary

The poetry collection I decided to analyze is No Matter the Wreckage by Sarah Kay. Sarah Kay is a young American female poet, known for her spoken word poetry. Kay is also the founder and co-director of Project VOICE, which uses spoken words poetry to promote empowerment, improve literacy, and encourage empathy and creative collaboration in classrooms and communities around the world. I appreciated Sarah Kay’s collection due to its modern voice and style, which made her poems easily relatable and understandable. She creates a young voice by her use of simple diction, syntax, and subject matter.
Firstly, Sarah Kay creates a young voice by not writing about overly complex subject matters. She writes about everyday experiences like love and family instead of
I enjoy end-stopped lines because they created an enjoyable pacing while reading. The end-stopped lines give the reader the ability to pause and think about what they are reading, which can help the reader understand the poems more thoroughly. The short end-stopped lines also cause her poetry to read more like a story because her short lines are detailed. For example, she writes, “I am twelve years old. My little brother is eight. He can surf better than I can, and I hate it”. Instead of having long lines with abstract images, Sarah Kay is able to give details as if she were telling the audience a story. I also admire end-stopped lines because it the reader more time to think about what the speaker is saying. The pausing and musicality of the end-stopped lines also creates a sense of comfort while reading. The short end-stopped lines of the poem makes the poem at ease visually because upon first glace at the poem, it does not seem overly complicated, which can be intimidating for new readers. Ultimately, Sarah Kay does this to make her poems easily read aloud like since she is a spoken word