The Facebook Sonnet

As the title states, the poem is a sonnet, and it follows many of the conventions of the English or Shakespearean sonnet form, although each line is shorter than in the traditional form. It is clear that the speaker does not care for Facebook, or at least for the way people use it. The poet may have a certain demographic in mind, since the first two lines relay how people use Facebook to reunite online with old friends from high school, as well as with past lovers, even if their relationship did not end well. The likely demographic Alexie’s speaker is addressing in his mocking, ironic tone is therefore neither teenagers nor people in their twenties nor even thirties, but people entering middle age; the poet himself was in his mid-forties when he wrote the poem, so it is possible he had his own generation in mind.

The speaker takes a negative view of how such people interact on Facebook. It is as if they are using it as a virtual playground where they attempt recreating an earlier stage in their lives. This is likely (although not directly stated in the poem) because they experience the present as unrewarding, or difficult, or otherwise troublesome.