American poet Julie Sheehan published her award-winning second poetry collection Orient Point in 2006, which includes the free verse “Hate Poem.” The collection features poetry about nature, relationships, and urban life written in a variety of styles, including traditional love poetry forms like the sonnet, a 14-line poem, and the ghazal, an Arabic structure consisting of rhymed couplets. In “Hate Poem,” Sheehan uses humor and hyperbole to explore the complexity of an intimate romantic relationship where the speaker both hates and loves the partner. The poem is expressed from the viewpoint of a woman whose “hate” for her partner permeates everything in her life, though she does not express this sentiment to the oblivious partner. Delivered in a tongue-in-cheek style, “Hate Poem” speaks to the ups and downs of a long-term relationship, the hate lovers can feel in the aftermath of an argument, and the paradox of feeling animosity towards an object of affection, and the effort of trying to make a commitment of this kind work. “Hate Poem” was included in The Best American Poetry 2005 anthology.

Poet Biography

Sheehan was born on July 25, 1964, and grew up in Pierson, Iowa. She went on to receive a BA from Yale University in 1986 and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University in 2001. She has authored three poetry collections: Thaw (2001), Orient Point (2006), and Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise (2010). Outside of these collections, Sheehan has published in magazines and anthologies such as Kenyon Review; Prairie Schooner; Yale Review; Poem in Your Pocket; The Best American Poetry; 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day; Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, God, War, Art, Sex, Madness, and Everything Else; and Garrison Keillor’s anthology, Good Poems: American Places.

Sheehan has won multiple awards for her poetry, including the Whiting Writers Award in 2008, a Barnard Women Poets Prize in 2005, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 2009, the Bernard F. Conners Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review, a Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Poets Out Loud Prize. She is currently the Director of the BFA in Creative Writing and Literature program at Stony Brook University Southampton, where she is an Associate Professor and Poet. She lives on Long Island, New York, with her family.

Poem Text

Sheehan, Julie. “Hate Poem.” 2006. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem opens with a direct, repeated statement from the speaker telling her unnamed and never described partner that she truly hates everything about them with every possible aspect of her body. She hates him with her body parts (from macro ones like her wrists to micro ones like her blood cells), with her gestures and mannerisms, and even with the potential sounds her body might make in the unlikely event of a moray eel attack.

In a funny, one-line second stanza, the speaker warns her partner to look out for her hate with the terminology of a golfer warning another player about an incoming ball.

The third stanza expands the speaker’s hate into references to other aspects of her life—primarily focusing on own life and history rather than their life together. She hates her partner with her toenail lint, her heritage, the story behind a keychain she owns, and her reactive sigh as her partner picks through his food. The imagery dives back inside her body to her genius and her aorta, which also hate him.

The fourth stanza is again only one line. A mundane part of their environment—a closed window—now also evokes the speaker’s hate, possibly because only one of them wants it closed.

The speaker’s speech and gestures express this hate in the fifth stanza. Some of these are clearly antagonistic, like her curt voice and her hesitation to join him for a drive. Others, however, are surprising and counterintuitive: her nice morning greeting is actually a sign of hate, as is her affectionate snuggling when she’s sleepy.

The sixth stanza continues the litany of hate. It returns to the speaker’s body parts: her eyes, her breasts inside her bra, and her lungs. The speaker uses her mind to hone her hate, as both her sense of humor and her ability to pick apart a recent argument hold on to negative feelings. But here, the poem turns: the hate turns out to be something the speaker perversely enjoys. The multiple annoyances that make her hate her partner are actually layers of a dessert parfait. The process of mentally identifying each hateful thing fills her with delight. And finally, though her lungs hate her partner, this hatred is like oxygen: the speaker can never have her fill of it because she needs it to live. The poem ends on an ambiguous note: the speaker’s lungs are slowly suffocating from their desire for perfection, like two people in a broken submarine that is running out of air.