First Advisor

Michele Glazer

Date of Publication

Spring 7-27-2017

Document Type

Closed Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in Creative Writing

Department

English

Language

English

Subjects

Memory -- Poetry, Psychic trauma -- Poetry

DOI

10.15760/etd.5895

Physical Description

1 online resource (vi, 113 pages)

Abstract

The poems in this collection are in search of. They are digging through the debris of memory, of memory blurred by trauma or degraded by time or worn thin from retrieval, from repeated examination—an ongoing attempt to apprehend. They are poems of internalized violence, addiction, domestic upheaval, sexual abuse, assault, abandonment, separation. They are also poems of adoption, of the overlap between stories, of roots and more roots, of tangled histories, of the point of rupture being the point of origination. As such, they are unsure of how to proceed, how to present themselves: they are self-conscious poems, anxious to communicate yet at times unable to break free of their own spiraling repetitions: the ritualized performance of pain as both an attempt to speak back to suffering as well as unintended proliferation of such. Compulsion. Depression. Suicidal ideation. Of course what we are talking about is the longevity of grief, its many mutations. How we learn to recognize it for what it is. What we can do with it.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

This thesis is only available to students, faculty and staff at PSU.

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/22723

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