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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Sequent Introduction is a rejection of Richard Rorty's assertion that traditional philosophical problems are no longer of use. This text is strong poetry, introducing new vocabularies and metaphors to redescribe traditional philosophical...
The poems in Dear Exorcist are derived from my own experience. The poems portray the struggle of working class individuals as well as my desire for self-actualization after recovering from physical, spiritual, and verbal abuse. As...
The following is a collection of poems written between 2003 and 2005. Many of the longer poems leap from place to place and image to image very quickly, much like the mind itself. Oftentimes a casual, conversational voice is utilized to...
For me, there has always been a wolf at the edge of the woods, watching and waiting. My sister often cried wolf, trying to shape reality into words that fit her emotional desperation. The rest of my family simply agreed not to speak of...
The following poems are variations on the personal narrative poem. Most clearly influenced by the post-confessional lyric poets, who continue to introduce hitherto-taboo subject matter in the manner of the confessional poets but who have...
In The Lord is Easy to Please I hope to convey the intimate tension between the various speakers' sacrilegious thoughts and her loss and longing. Aesthetically, I consciously avoid imposing a bias toward faith or faithlessness and often...
The poems in the dissertation Monster Truck Seductions explore the interconnectedness of identity and myth. Probing the constantly shifting dynamics of dominant and marginal identity categories, such as self/other, male/female, ...
'Surviving Suburban Malls' is a collection of original poems that question expectations placed upon women in popular female consumerist culture. The collection is divided into three parts: the first section focuses on expectations placed...
The Cutting Room Floor explores the life of Frankenstein's monster, as narrated by the creature himself. True to Mary Shelley's original book, the monster has no name but recognizes that he is often mistakenly called 'Frankenstein, '...
A book of poetry that uses avant-garde, post-modernist writing practices such as fragmented syntax, disjunctive narrative, a multiplicity of speakers and collage to explore female American identity in the 21st century as a historical...
Inscriptions is a collection of poems inspired, in part, by the twenty-four poem opening section of Walt Whitman's 1892 "Death-bed" edition of Leaves of Grass, entitled "Inscriptions." The poems of direct address in the first section...
This dissertation is a collection of short stories that take place in Vietnam and the United States. The stories are small in scope: narrated in either the first-person or close-third person, they are centered on the family and romantic...
Astronaut is a collection of poems centered in the Florida Panhandle. Part trauma narrative, part ecocritical treatise, Astronaut continues the project of its author's first book, Romeo Bones, in attempting to give speech to the silenced.
The Optimists' Birthdayis a collection of poems that blends the autobiographical lyric of the confessional mode with persona poems and prayer poems to explore themes of anxiety, marriage, religious doubt, and spiritual longing. The first...
Since everything is a text, if only we can learn how to read it, the prose poems in the dissertation manuscript Speak Universe are about interpretations, or rather, reinterpretations, or better still, productive misinterpretations of the...
This dissertation is a collection of poems that draws on a variety of 20th century American poetic traditions, as a way to pay homage to Walt Whitman's vision of America as a democracy of diversity. These poems celebrate the diversity...
The dissertation manuscript Gog chronicles my experiences as a Jehovah's Witness from a working-class family, investigating larger issues of poverty, religious persecution, and generational cycles of violence while also exploring the...
The poems in the following dissertation are centered on the theme of bodily transformations, from the involuntary changes of illness and aging to the voluntary ones of plastic surgery and gender reassignment. The poems in the...
The poems in The Pale Cinema of Color and Broken Conversation emerge from the writer's perception of the glorious illogic of his own life. More than from a traditional canon of literature, these poems derive their form and style from, as...
Of the Out of Style takes its title from Jimi Hendrix's afrofuturist proto-prog rock masterpiece "1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)." As a collection the poems, as Hendrix puts it in song, take a last look / at the killing noise / of...
These poems explore what it is to be desirable, whether sexually, culturally, or otherwise. In questioning desire, its manifestations and triggers, these poems attempt to complicate the readers' understanding of love and loss in...
Traitor, Traitor is a collection of poetry combining Celtic selkie myths with the Caribbean Nanny figure to construct a narrative about a widower living in the foothills of the Appalachians during the mid-20th Century. Grounded in the...
The poems in Former Queen of the Amazons comprise the speakers' garbled negotiation of the world around them and the clamoring voices they possess. Written within a matrix of culture, woman-hood, and persona, the poems holler with chaos, ...
Some saints have poverty. Others, the ill or indigent. Evelyn Ellenberger has herself. This novel deals with themes of asceticism and sainthood as the main character, Evelyn, experiences mystic visions of St. Catherine of Siena and tries...
ABSTRACT The poems in the dissertation, The Hurt Business, explore the often difficult and contentious sites of human contact. The poems explore what it is to bear witness to blighted urban landscapes, dysfunctional family and a world in...
Every day I find images that evoke deep connections in me. These images occur when I see a woman jogging, read a marquee, or overhear a conversation at the grocery store, the coffee house, or post office. When I write I try to make sense...
My dissertation, The Cairo Letters, is a collection of poems that draws largely on the epistolary tradition. One section describes a series of letters I received from a first love living in Cairo, Egypt. They were long and lonesome and...
As Close As Hands focuses on the lives of twin sisters, Beth and Rachel Berkowitz. After years of being teased by classmates about their Jewish noses, they hatch a plan to raise money to have them altered. Once in college, with jobs...
This manuscript is the culmination of my earliest work. Many of these poems are lyric narratives and 'confessional' although what part of writing does not simultaneously reveal and conceal at the same time? Influences include Sylvia...
The dissertation manuscript Count Four is a collection of poems that attempts to address the often-conflicting identities of their speakers. Thematically, these poems cover a broad array of personal topics such as family, suicide, fame, ...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
