Theses and Dissertations Collection

“She Says It This Way :” is a conversation in writing with the poetic work She Says by Vénus Khoury-Ghata and a simultaneous exploration in the essence of form. Forty-one-word paragraphs populate these pages in response to phrases from She Says. Amidst the paragraphs can be found written discussions of how form—while constructing and reinforcing aspects of consciousness—similarly constrains and frees the writer. “She Says It This Way :” began also as an experiment in allowing form to serve as a support structure that might recondition the mind/body post-trauma. The project evolved into a micro-memoir, compelled by multiple languages, becoming its own container from which to study the ways grammar, sound, rhythm and syntax are ancestral—become home / of the earth.