In 2001, Erica Hunt noted that “Years ago, I was asked whether my poems are about ‘real things’…That question about poetry and the ‘real’ pushes the horizon for poetry. How does strategies of excavation have value beyond their practice, to influence the world in which we live? Hunt’s work enacts this rule through a series of prose events in Local History, her first book published in 1993. Hunt’s playful prose poems present. New histories, local histories by an African American woman who is witness to a world order in which looks are not what they seem. Hunt does more than just simply “scratching the surface”. Her poems converge at the dialect between personal life and global power structures that inform the progressions of everyday life.

Her poems tend to have political meanings. “No thought police, we all became deputies, we never let a line blur.” (59)I believe that writing is beginning to have a social existence in a world where authority has become highly mobile, based less on identity and barely on discussed relationships.  Hunt’s tone is more fanciful, creating and discarding a series of situations in which the veracity of language is tested. Hunt presents language as an active presence that can inflate experience. In addition, the title of the poem draws attention to the fact that Hunt’s writing practice deconstructs traditional narrative structures. Furthermore, language itself presents a hurdle to getting near to the knowledge of subjectivity.

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