Lamisse Hamouda

Poetry has always known what neurodivergent readers know in the body. Anaphora, refrain, the rocking of metre, the flick and return of the pantoum: these are the motions a stimming body makes. The hand at the wrist, the rocking at the hips, the phrase said over and over under the breath until it goes soft at the edges. And yet criticism, for the most part, treats repetition as a device. It is catalogued as technique, praised as emphasis, diagnosed as excess when there is too much of it. What it is almost never called is what it so often is: regulation.