[you fit into me]

Margaret Atwood (1939 - ) ↗

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

Notes

What happens when the person who fits you perfectly is also the one who hurts you? Margaret Atwood's [you fit into me] begins with the familiar promise of romantic compatibility, only to overturn it through the brutal image of a fish hook entering an eye. Four lines are enough to turn affection into something frightening. The fantasy of perfect union contains an inherent contradiction: to eliminate the distance between two subjects is also to threaten their autonomy. Atwood exposes the violence concealed within the desire for absolute intimacy, where the beloved becomes an object to be possessed rather than an independent consciousness to be encountered. October's decay begins with this corruption of tenderness. Love need not disappear for a relationship to deteriorate; sometimes it survives as the very language through which possession and cruelty become acceptable. #MargaretAtwood #PoetryCommunity #CanadianLiterature #FeministLiterature #ToxicRelationships

About the author

Margaret Atwood ↗

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work is the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Order of Canada, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award for literature, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.