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.
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.
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...
Beasts in the Dark is a collection of poems held together by an elemental voice in search of identity. Multiple selves are revealed on the journey for identity, and the poems ask hard questions, probe into suffering corners of human want...
The poems in Else are lyric explorations of paradox. Specifically, they meditate on the idea that what gives comfort also has the potential to cause great harm. The central focus of the collection is a troubled relationship, but regional...
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...
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...
The lives and landscapes that exist within these poems serve as catalysts for reflections upon issues related to personal familial conflict, the attempt to construct a pragmatic, moral structure while struggling with the influence of...
The following is a collection of unconnected short stories inspired by studying the work of short fiction authors, the likes of which include (but are not limited to) Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, and Jane...
Ghost City is a collection of poetry about Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It travels through the history, landscape, and family of the writer's hometown. The poems take up themes of love, loss, food, hope, and family. The author seeks to...
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, '...
In SALVATION PHILOSOPHY FOR TODAY, Melinda Wilson explores questions and grievances regarding feminism, everyday sexism, motherhood, fertility, marriage, love and domesticity. The poems approach and unearth our darkest appetites in...
Looking for the Perfect Blueberry Pancake is the fictional story of John Smith--an ex-cook depressed with the superficiality of his ninety-hour-per-week job managing a high-end cigar bar and disenchanted with what he thought would be a...
The poems in this manuscript are an exploration of the post-divorce grieving process. They seek out a midpoint between grief and growth, the changing definition of family, and balance between self and Other. Each section of the...
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 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...
My thesis 'Swamp Fire' began with the essay of the same name. After I wrote this essay, I decided to do a nonfiction thesis and began asking my family questions. I wanted to know about my parents' struggles, about how we ended up where...
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...
Dr. Carol Tratchy once theorized that eventually we would need to reevaluate our nomenclatures regarding our most recent artistic eras. For instance, the "Modern Era" came into use nearly one hundred years ago; it is hardly an accurate...
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...
Ordinary days were best, Donald Hall writes in his book-length elegy to his wife, Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia. What I want my poetry to do is convey the spirituality of the ordinary, the knowledge that all the things we love are...
Ranging from the elegiac to sarcastic, humorous to furious, distant, alienated, amused, and intimate, the poems in Hot Stare America aim to balance social critique with praise, protest poems with odes, the blues with jokes, nostalgia, ...
The poems in this manuscript attempt to navigate the realm between dream states and reality, or between this life and the next; at the same time, they are often obsessed with locating a balance between lyric and narrative, between image...
The poems in Dear Bright explore the possibly of love in a deeply anxious world. They are often epistolary, addressing the eponymous Bright through a series of imagined universes in which the speaker and Bright can create and recreate...
The Second Knock is a compilation of poems composed between 2000 and 2006. It is written out of a sense of curiosity and in an attempt to know the world and the people in it. To see similarities and differences. To live in my imaginings...
A collection of original poetry which combines the aesthetics of traditional American verse with a character driven study of transvestites, murderers, and Marlin Perkins.
The following dissertation is a collection of poetry that, in large part, reveals the narrative of Zinnie Lucas, a fictional character set among historical events in my family's past. The poems are told from the point of view (sometimes...
The collection of poems, These Mouths, is an exploration of feminine identities and feminine experience. Many of the poems in this manuscript reference Catholic figures, myths, the speaker's struggles with their own faith and religious...
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, ...
The poems in my thesis manuscript "Still the Girl" operate in a solar system of candy, social media and the American South. I use preconceived notions of pop culture, kitsch and cute to cut to the quick--nothing is quite as disarming as...
Look at My Sky is a collection of poems that expresses the value of living, the need we have to be heard, loved and understood. These pictures on the inside walls of a moment evoke emotion, celebrate the human spirit, and give voice to...
This collection of poems, The Lone Ranger Dines Again, is divided into three sections: "Million Dollar Wallpaper, a series of miscellaneous poems ranging in topic from a Colombian drug lord to instructions for playing baseball like a...
The poems in the dissertation, American Accent, are a unification of the hybrid identity of their writer. The poems explore what it means to be American, geographically and mentally, for a Polish-American 'migr' writer. The poems begin...
I always preferred fried chicken over hamburgers or hotdogs when I was a kid. And though that seems like a terrible way to begin an abstract about poetry, I have to admit that it sums up most of what I have learned about it. Poetry has...
Dear Blackbird, is a collection of lyric-narrative poems that seeks to capture the spirit of the rural southern towns my family grew up in. As such, letters to a blackbird (written from the point of view of a scarecrow) are interspersed...
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.
