Plahm takes the word “terrible” and works it like a blacksmith—heating, hammering, reshaping it across the poem until it means the opposite of what it started as. The opening—”You’re a good-looking woman. / Terribly full of logic”—deploys “terribly” in the colloquial intensifier sense (terribly = very), but the word already carries its darker freight: to be terribly full of logic, as a woman, is to be terribly threatening to those who prefer women without it. The repetition of “terribly, terrible” through the early stanzas is deliberate accumulation—the word keeps arriving like a verdict from a court that has already decided the defendant is guilty of competence.

The racial dimension is stated without flinching: “A woman of color, unapologetic and true, / yet not the right color of white. / In their eyes, terribly, utterly, wrong.” The line “not the right color of white” is the poem’s sharpest social observation—it identifies the unspoken standard against which this woman is measured and names it with surgical precision. The instruction “Don’t ride a subway train— / without carried fire” is both practical and metaphorical: carry protection, carry power, carry the flame of your own self.

The “Self” catalog is the poem’s structural centerpiece, and its formal discipline is striking for a poet who typically resists lists without digression. Eight “Self-” compounds arranged in two groups of four: the first group physical and internal (supporting, aware, made, disciplined), the second group political and civic (governing, determined, motivated, sustaining). The pivot to the physical—”Who does / 100 sit-ups / and 50 pullups— / pure power”—grounds the abstractions in the body, insisting that self-determination is not merely philosophical but muscular. This is a woman whose politics live in her deltoids as much as her convictions.

The poem’s most formally inventive passage is the escalating adverb pile: “absolutely, terribly, / horribly, unforgivingly, / terrifyingly—” Each word is a ratchet tightening the fear that this woman generates in those who need her diminished. But the payoff—”the devil incarnate”—is delivered in bold, revealing that the source of all those adverbs is not the woman’s nature but her audience’s terror. She is the devil only to those who worship at the altar of her diminishment.

The closing pivot is the poem’s warmest and most personal turn: “Must be why— / I pay attention / to you.” After the political analysis, the social critique, the muscular catalog, the speaker steps forward as an individual—not a commentator but an admirer, a man who is drawn to exactly what “they” fear. “I love a / terribly, fabulously lovely smile from a Lady” reclaims “terribly” one final time, transforming it from a weapon aimed at the woman into a word of admiration aimed by the speaker. The closing image—”a masterwork of power, / spine straight”—converts the body into art: the straight spine is both posture and principle, both physical fact and moral metaphor.

A poem that accomplishes something difficult: it celebrates a specific woman while addressing a systemic condition, and it does both without reducing either to a slogan. The reclamation of “terrible” is the poem’s most sustained formal achievement—by the time the word appears for the last time (“terribly, fabulously lovely”), it has been transformed from an accusation into a badge, from a weapon into a crown. The eight-part “Self” catalog is the poem’s structural spine and its most memorable passage; the parallel construction creates a drumbeat rhythm that sounds like the 100 sit-ups it describes—repetitive, disciplined, building strength through form. The physical interlude (sit-ups and pullups) is an essential grounding move: without it, the “Self” catalog would be purely abstract; with it, the woman’s self-determination is given a body, a heartbeat, a sweat-soaked specificity. “Not the right color of white” is the poem’s most incisive social line, naming the invisible standard with an economy that more explicit political poems often lack. The “carried fire” instruction is both practical and poetic—fire as weapon and fire as spirit, protection and illumination. The shift from third-person portrait to first-person admiration (“Must be why— / I pay attention / to you”) is the poem’s emotional hinge, and it works because the speaker doesn’t claim ownership or desire but attention—the choice to look, to see, to recognize what others deliberately ignore. The closing “spine straight” is a two-word thesis: the woman is upright, literally and morally, and the straightness is both her physical bearing and her refusal to bend. Where the poem could push further is in its middle section, which stays in the catalog mode without the narrative or imagistic surprise that the opening and closing achieve—the “Self” list, while powerful in rhythm, relies on the prefix’s repetition rather than specific scenes of self-realization in action. But the poem knows its form: this is a portrait, not a story, and the portrait is sharp, specific, and drawn with evident love. A poem that proves the most threatening thing a woman can be is exactly herself.