Amiri Baraka’s “As Agony. As Now” does not have a single line that isn’t tinted with suffering or a single stanza that doesn’t make readers’ skin crawl. The poem describes the feeling of being a stranger to your own body, as if your soul is a separate entity from your physical form. This work is riddled with disturbing diction and imagery, and perfectly is able to describe every human action in a perturbing way. Baraka describes the “fouled tunes that come in to his breath”, the “enclosure” of a body in which he is encaged in, and the “cold air blown through narrow blind eyes”. He also writes the word “flesh” 6 times and the word “pain” 4 times, which adds to the overall atmosphere of this poem. There are also many phrases that seem to contradict each other. The speaker speaks of the disgusting smells and feelings he gets in this body, and also questions if he feels pain.  Yet later in the poem he writes that “it has no feeling” just to on to say that “It burns the thing inside it. And that thing screams.” These contractions make the poem feel incredibly personal, as if readers are hearing the subconscious and conscious thoughts of an individual as they are having this horrible experience. This poem immediately reminded me of William Faulkner’s “As I Laying Dying” in which characters have a similar stream of consciousness as they try to overcome loss and piece together the thoughts in their mind. The form of this poem is partially disorganized. Some parenthesis aren’t finished, there are many enjambments and caesuras, stanzas have varying line numbers, and a stanza is broken up weirdly in line 23. Yet, there is also a flow through the poem, as the stanzas begin to grow and then shrink as the poem concludes. This shows the chaos that inhabits the structure of the human mind. I really like this poem because it (along with many other modern poems) can really lead to a plethora of different interpretations, all surrounding the minds path to organize thoughts surrounding a traumatizing experience.