The mirror—it casts its glow on a subject yet unseen. In some cases, its reflective surface affords perception. In others, it obscures it, evades it into distorted fragments. Such a collision of self and sight prompts a crisis of self. “Why was I born among mirrors?” wrote Federico García Lorca. “A true citizen of planet earth closes their eyes / and says what they are before the mirror,” wrote Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. How far can one see themselves depicted? And what are the surfaces that cannot be exposed?

Readers of the lyric essay, those reflective attempts to try, will appreciate Katherine Indermaur’s essay I|I (Seneca Review Books). Indermaur composes the book-length essay in sections of fragments, whose dispersing power taking us from mirrors, to divination, to photography, to skin, to Jesus. This wide range of this lyricism begins with an initial bifurcation of her subject. “N.B.” the editors urge us, “the title is pronounced by repeating the personal pronoun ‘I’ once after a brief pause.” The pause inserted between two sides of a self allows the reader to scatter the construction of the self on either side of a substance. Every self is an “I|I,” every possession, a “my|my.” The device of the vertical bar between the subject and its transposition in the mirror is (and forgive the pun, but) two-fold. Each depiction of a subject brings to mind its reflection. Each embodiment of a subject brings it to hesitancy above the surface.

Because of course, the surface is not stable. These are broken objects, in whose cracks and fragments we might see a new dimension of a self. “Mirrors recall us to the sole and nightmarish powers we have to hold all of who we are within one frame, lest our minds fly out of our hands and float wide, or crack from side to side.” To Indermaur, reflective surfaces are those that necessarily present, efface and break down the person who attempts to see. Her subject frequently consults it as the plane of self and reminder of un-self, calling into question the surface and the border of one’s reflection.

Admittedly, one can lose themselves in the abstractions of this pursuit of self. Where Indermaur retrieves us from the perils of endless pontification is the personal. Her subject experiences a compulsion to pick the skin on her face in front of a mirror. “Make your body transparent in spots. Like there is a truest layer, a deepest surface. / Oh little wounds, little faith.” To understand the impact of the mirror on the subject’s sense of self, Indermaur looks within, to the core of self that fears and delights in exposure. The risk, we realize, is not so much the mirror as the skin. There is a gleam of layer wrapped tightly around the self. It bears with it the twin threat of obscurity and exposure of a final “true” self.

I|I is a roundabout text. It seeks an object by dispersing its correlates. Kazim Ali described the fragments of Indermaur’s essay as “rather a full shape in time and space assembles,” and I sincerely agree. In the shattered fragments of Indermaur’s essay arose a glow illuminating another pursuit altogether: I left I|I an entirely different object. I felt seen, and yet I had been evaded.

I|I by Katherine Indermaur, Seneca Review, $19.99

Halley McArn is an MFA candidate at Louisiana State University. She uses writing to see how thoughts grow. Originally from the northeast, she worked for several years as a caseworker and database designer for education nonprofits. She is the Nonfiction Editor for the New Delta Review.