Traub notes, “critics have also demonstrated Phillips’s indebtedness to a discourse of male amicitia, to the genre of pastoral, and to the conventions of heterosexual love poetry, particularly the metaphysical conceits of John Donne” (248-49). I read Phillips’s poems before Traub’s essay, and immediately noticed her adherence to the ideas of John Donne’s “The Ecstasy.” She speaks of “our twin souls in one shall grow” (49) and “That if each would resume their own…That each is in the union lost” (15, 18). While Traub claims that Phillips’s poetry exhibits chaste female-female friendship, I would question that claim given the similarities to Donne’s philosophical ideas and alternative lens of sexual climax.