Tanis Macdonald torques time and consciousness to scrutinize "what plagues us/what snaps our heads to/rights and won't let us look/at look over look alive." Written in the voices of a demanding "speaking subject" -- a fury with a harpy's vision and a muse's asperity -- and the woman writer whom the Fury takes under her terrible wing, Rue the Day is an elegy, an argument about the knowledge, and a conversation about contemporary femininity that shuttles between the frame of form and the long declarative line.