Inventive in form and wordplay, startling in enjambment, Adoptee Song examines the lens of adoption through the counterfactual exploration of what could have been, mining childhood, language, place, and the concept of a birth mother. In three sections, with poems that echo and reflect each other, Picone explores themes of identity, belonging, and alienation that exist within the heightened music of the self. Adoptee Song draws around the negative space of the ineffable, inviting readers into the mapped territory of a person who simultaneously belongs to two places and neither.
