Date of Award

Spring 2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English

Committee Director

Luisa Igloria

Committee Member

Tim Seibles

Committee Member

Remica Bingham-Risher

Abstract

This manuscript investigates a poetics of desire—how desire manifests in and around the self, the body, and the world. Bearing witness to desire has afforded me an opportunity to develop and refine my own sensibility in my poems, which are deeply personal and narrative by nature, and craft my work around these related themes: Spirituality, marriage, grief, home, identity, sobriety, love, and even racial and environmental concerns. In my work, desire represents a container for a broad consideration of yearning, and wanting—and how to manage such feelings every day, in the world.

Elegy motivates many of these poems, though like desire, I’m working within a broad understanding of elegy with respect to both form and content. The idea of elegy is rooted in honoring the dead, and that is part of my work, but also just the beginning. In this manuscript, elegy means shedding layers of self, inviting in the new, accepting what is, and what is not, and allowing emotional space for the entirety of the experience. There is grief, but there is joy here, too. I want my poems to contain all of 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).

DOI

10.25777/khwj-v372

ISBN

9780355039702

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