Spahr's deceptively simple language conveys a serious and complex assessment of civic duty and the potential for political agency in a time when selfhood -- one's sense of uniqueness and of the permanence of one's personality -- has been severely compromised. Under fire by a mass media that trivializes all values for the sake of ratings and shunned by the opaque workings of a State that ignores, for the sake of control, the eye of the radical democrat, the individual is, in Spahr's poetry, revived to take center stage, floodlit by possiblity. Response, Spahr's first book (Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You appeared in 2001), was the winner of the National Poetry Series in 1996, and demands of the reader a new sense of participation in the social world.