Theses and Dissertations Collection

I believe poems are meant to be speech. These poems are each an exploration of what a given speaker may say, given their perception of their lived experience in our modern world. As our language changes, especially through speech, so does our understanding of the world. In a sense all of life is education and our identities transform throughout our lifetimes— all the while processed ultimately (at least to others) as language, ordered sentences of sequenced words. These speakers, like all human beings, are intersectional, as there is no monolithic narrative. They see their world in and with varying levels of complexity and like many of our certainties can at times be downright problematic. They grapple with understanding sanity, love, masculinity, capitalism, longing, objectification, gender roles, and cynicism. And as only poems can, they attempt to render the unfathomable nature of such things with a felt sense of resonance.