Mr. &

These poem grapple with issues of how relationships are defined and what we gain or lose from them, including same-sex and opposite-sex relationships alike. The poem reflect on the experience not only of the poet, but also of wives throughout history, particularly as represented in classic literary texts from Geoffrey Chaucer to Joan Didion.

For example, Fitzpatrick's "The Genius of Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With" is inspired by a paragraph in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The fragments of the central poetry sequence, "Mr. &," draw their language, respectively, from the final chapters of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bront , The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront , Emma by Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Summer by Edith Wharton, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti, Summer Rain by Marguerite Duras, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, and Asa, As I Knew Him by Susanna Kaysen.

Fitzpatrick's "The Definition of" comprises various Google results for different manipulations of the phrase "marriage is," and his poem "Vow" draws its language from what is thought to be Anne Boleyn's last letter to her husband Henry VIII, written while she was awaiting execution at the Tower of London.

Together, these poems constitute an extended meditation on what comes after the ampersand in the phrase that serves as the title of the book, "Mr. &."