The poem’s title gives away one of the main themes of the work: the function and practicality of poetry. By naming the poem “Selecting a Reader,” Kooser comments on poetry's relationship to real life and the average person. In the title, Kooser mocks poetry's alleged superiority by imagining his speaker deigning to select a single ideal reader for his work. This self-mocking tone reflects Kooser’s critical attitude to obtuse works of literature; in his 2007 conversation with Kenyon Review, for example, Kooser criticizes the Modernist movement in literature, explaining that in its effort to emphasize fragmentation and alienation, it “did its best to exclude a lot of readers by its difficulty, its elitism.” For Kooser’s speaker, his selected reader is a “beautiful” (Line 1) woman. The gendered diction creates tension: The poem starts as the male speaker Kooser employs the feminine pronoun “her” (Line 1) and the term “beautiful” (Line 1). Kooser doesn’t define “beautiful,” but this first line ensures that the male gaze becomes a part of the experience of reading the poem.

As the poem continues, the timid, isolated tone of Lines 2 and 3 indicate that the speaker is not referring to a glamorous kind of beauty. The woman walks “carefully” (Line 2) to the speaker’s poetry “at the loneliest moment of an afternoon” (Line 3). The image is sad and strict, as the woman appears gently drawn to the speaker’s poetry.

The speaker notes that the woman’s hair is “still damp at the neck / from washing it” (Lines 4-5). This image suggests the woman is careless about her beauty as she seems not to care that her hair is still wet. In Lines 6-7, the speaker emphasizes the woman’s carelessness with the image of a raincoat, which is “dirty / from not having money enough for the cleaners.”  Here, the notion of wealth and its link to readers of poetry emerges as a key theme.

In Line 8, the woman takes out her glasses in the bookstore. The speaker’s choice to imagine a woman who wears glasses as beautiful complicates the speaker’s definition of beauty as past tropes around glasses suggest that women who wear them are unattractive or unapproachable. In this poem, however, the speaker subverts the trope about women and glasses, demonstrating interest in the woman and calling her beautiful.

Ironically, the speaker’s imagined reader does not seem to think highly of his poetry. She “thumb[s]” (Line 9) through his work, and this verb has a critical connotation. The woman does not carefully examine the speaker’s poetry; rather, she treats the work casually, putting the book back on the shelf to demonstrate that the poems cannot hold her interest. The image of the woman putting the book back on the shelf symbolizes rejection, indicating that the speaker seeks to undercut stereotypical male-female power dynamics.

In the poem’s last two lines, the speaker gives the imagined woman space to speak: “'For that kind of money, I can get / my raincoat cleaned’” (Lines 12-13), she says. The woman’s rejection of the poem and her preference to invest in the care of her own belongings mean that her priorities are practical. The poem ends with the sentence, “And she will” (Line 13), which reinforces the resolve and determination of the woman to move on from the speaker’s book of poetry.

With this final image, the speaker sardonically suggests that his imagined reader is someone who would rather spend their money on more useful things than a book of poems.