“Can you provide a definition of the word ‘woman’?” Marsha Blackburn, Republican Senator from Tennessee, asked Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at Jackson’s confirmation hearing. Jackson wisely declined to take Blackburn’s wildly inappropriate bait. Jane Yevgenia Muschenetz, however, finds poetry to be the perfect medium in which to confront such questions that seek to diminish women and marginalized communities. And confront them she does, repeatedly, in her short yet remarkable collection Power Point.

“Point of Order,” the opening poem, begins with Blackburn and is followed by Muschenetz’s answers to the senator’s question: bullet-pointed evidence of the dramatically different spaces men and women occupy in our society, creating an artistically innovative representation of inequitable power dynamics baked into our current system.

An MIT MBA graduate and a beautiful poet, Muschenetz came to the U.S. from Soviet Ukraine as a ten-year-old Jewish refugee. In Power Point, she utilizes technology to create poems as only an MIT graduate might.

In “100% MOM, a Powerpoint Poem About Women and Labor,” Muschenetz places distressing statistics about women in the labor force beside those detailing maternal mortality rates, all within the letters spelling “MOM.” Similar in form but featuring statistics regarding sexual violence is “ME TOO, a Point of Consensus, Parts 1 and 2.” In “Point Blank,” Muschenetz lodges statistics of gun violence inside the image of a pistol. This one stopped me cold.

By seeing the world as it is, Muschenetz challenges us to imagine a different way of being. She closes the collection with “STOP this poem!,” one of the more traditional forms that are interspersed among the data poems:

It’s not only possible
it’s been done before, and more than just once or twice
and by people just as imperfect as we are,
with even less opportunity to get it right …
Read the leaves while they’re still on the tree.
Ripen to fullness
Become un-pluckable.

What a wonderful charge, one that underlies each poem in Muschenetz’s unique and compelling collection. “Become un-pluckable!” Inspiring words and a wish I share for all of us.