Lyric Selfhood and Lyric Cellphies in Margaret Christakos’s Her Paraphernalia

This essay reads Margaret Christakos’s Her Paraphernalia, particularly its use of photography, social media posts, family archives, memoir, and poetry to consider how Christakos’s intergenre memoir extends her investigation into experimental feminist lyric. Her Paraphernalia extends Christakos’s longstanding interest in lyric form by drawing lyric into relation with a wide array of genres and modes of expression in her investigation into selfhood as mediated—and problematized—through both lyric and antilyric modalities. Her development of a lyric eye/I, enacted through her deployment of photography, is a key aspect of her book’s engagement with lyric as an intersubjective mode of expression. The notion of paraphernalia—what belongs to a woman outside of her dowry—functions as an organizing concept throughout the work and is connected to Christakos’s exploration of a lyric I that lies outside of heteropatriarchal and capitalist structures of lineage, marriage, and property.