18 pages • 36 minutes read
Kim AddonizioWhat Do Women Want?
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and meter
“What Do Women Want?” is comprised of 27 lines of free verse in one stanza. The point of view is that of a first-person speaker. The language of the poem is informal and conversational, and addresses the reader directly. While there is no formal meter—the lines of the poem are not measured out rhythmically in a pattern of feet—the poet creates rhythm and music with the use of poetic devices including repetition and internal rhyme. The poet guides the pace of the poem through a mix of shorter and longer lines.
While end rhyme does not play a formal role, it exists in ways that are at times exact and at other times slanted:
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only (Lines 11-14).
Two examples of slant rhymes are brothers and shoulders, as well as dolly and only. A pair of exact rhymes occur toward and at the end of the poem:
to carry me into this world, through
the birth cries and the love-cries too (Lines 23-24),
as well as:
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in (Lines 25-27).
The last line of the poem has the sonic quality of rising meter, as it ends on a stressed syllable after two unstressed syllables.
Anaphora
Anaphora is a device that employs the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive and/or multiple phrases within a poem to create a certain effect. In prose, it is a technique common to speeches and sermons. Anaphora creates a sonic rhythm that builds momentum, deepens emotion, and roots meaning. The phrase, “I want” (Line 1) is an example of anaphora in “What Do Women Want?” and appears on 10 occasions in the poem. Six of these instances occur in the first seven lines, lending a kind of breathlessness to the speaker’s desire. The reader—through the repetition of “I want” on Lines 1 and 2, twice on Line 3, and returning to begin Live 5 before appearing in the middle of Line 7—feels the excitement of the speaker’s yearning for this physical thing, which she details, in between the declarations of want, through the lens of how snug and skimpy it is.
When “I want” (Line 14) appears again, the object of desire is no longer the dress but “to walk like I’m the only / woman on earth” (Lines 14-15). The longed-for thing is no longer a thing but an attitude empowered by the thing. The next use of the phrase clarifies that what the speaker wants she does not have, though she wants it “bad” (Line 16). At this point, the speaker would prefer for the imagined dress to do her speaking for her—to let the reader know, without a word, that she is a woman who cares little for public opinion about her character.
The final use of the phrase comes in the form of “what / I want” (Lines 20-21). In the fulfillment of this dream, the speaker’s own unfettered desire is the object. It is far from frivolous; it is necessary. It is the only thing that matters.
Assonance
While alliteration—the repetition of initial consonant sounds—is obvious straight away in “What Do Women Want?” (the repeated “w” sound suggests a whine, as in wah, wah, wah), internal rhyme abounds among vowel sounds, as well. Assonance begins with the short “e” sounds of “red dress” (Line 1). It appears again in “backless” (Line 5) and “guess” (Line 6). The long “e” sounds of “underneath” (Line 7) and “street” (Line 8) suggest these words have a racy connection, underscoring how risqué it is to be wearing nothing underneath one’s red dress on the street.
Further on, “day-old” (Line 10) finds an echo in “donuts” (Line 11); the primary “o” sounds in “onto the dolly” (Line 12) lends a kind of sonic openness, as does “over their shoulders” (Line 13). The proximity of the short “a” sounds in “woman” (Line 15) and “can” (Line 15) imply a degree of agency: Yes, she can.
