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“When a near rhyme is lost to slow / changes in pronunciation,” Lerner writes in “Meridian Response,” “a call goes out / for work / to reconstruct it: / love / and move, alterations in / the mouth.”

It’s there in her uses of slant and near rhyme as well as uneven line lengths to make the words feel like conversation instead of lyrics, without ever falling out of step with the lope of the music, as in the song’s bridge: