📖 Key Terms

📖 Key Terms

Extended metaphor

A comparison carried across an entire poem or text rather than stated once and moved on from. In Tissue, paper is the poem's extended metaphor: Dharker applies its physical qualities (thin, transparent, fragile, light-allowing) to every structure of human power across eleven stanzas.

Enjambment

When a sentence or phrase runs over from one line to the next without pause or punctuation stop. Dharker uses enjambment throughout to control the pace and to place individual words — "light", "skin", "break" — in positions of emphasis and isolation.

Volta

A turn in a poem's argument — a moment where the direction or subject shifts significantly. In Tissue, the volta arrives with "This is / the tissue / that layers / skin" (stanza 9): Dharker reveals that the poem's subject has been human life all along.

Semantic field

A cluster of words drawn from the same area of meaning. Dharker builds a semantic field of fragility and light ("transparent", "thinned", "shine through", "break through", "float") that runs from the first stanza to the last, unifying the poem's argument.

Free verse

Poetry that does not follow a regular rhyme scheme or line length. Dharker uses free verse throughout Tissue — the absence of fixed structure mirrors the poem's argument that rigid, man-made structures are less honest than transient, human ones.