Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Easy Hearts: A Novel, Andrew J. Olsen

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Easy Hearts is a novel set in contemporary Texas. Justin Borchard, just paroled after three and-a-half years in prison, returns to his hometown in East Texas where his wife, Melinda, has been tending bar at the Shortleaf Inn. After Melinda confesses to a brief affair with a local oil executive named Waylon Goodwin, an affair she has ended, and facing limited prospects in their hometown, Melinda and Justin make the hard choice to accept a proposition from Waylon: they will leave home for Hearts County, a desolate swatch of hardpan in the Permian Basin of West Texas, where Waylon has …

Ooliths, Estelle Mazor

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

OOLITHS is a poetry collection that challenges commonly held American values such as the sanctity of the family, the American Dream, the nobility of parenthood, and faith in God. Divided into eight sections, the collection follows the arc of childhood, adolescence, maturity and decline. Images of birds, crickets, the beach, the moon, and rainstorms anchor the poems to Miami’s natural habitat and to each other, while images involving music, sleep, raisins, coffee beans and eggs unite them in the realm of the domestic.

OOLITHS includes traditional forms such as sonnets, as well as nonce forms, prose poems, free verse and …

Calle Panadero, Giselda Aguiar

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of nine short stories follows Adelia Villalobos and Isidoro Belmonte, two Cuban Americans solving crimes in present-day South Florida. The former best friends have grown apart during college, but when Adelia is drawn into a murder case, the outcome leads Isidoro to return home and the pair to found the unlicensed detective agency, Calle Panadero (Spanish for Baker Street). Their cases explore the underside of many facets of the community, including bigamy, fraud, and criminal organizations. Along the way, they deal with love, death, and family obligations, and arrive at a new understanding of how their destinies are …

Nec(Romantic), Cathleen F. Chambless

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

NEC(ROMANTIC) is a poetry collection thematically linked through images of insects, celestial bodies, bones, and other elements of the supernatural. These images are indicative of spells, but the parenthesis around romantic in the collection’s title also implies idealism. The poems explore the author’s experiences with death, grief, love, oppression, and addiction. NEC(ROMANTIC) employs the use of traditional forms such as the villanelle, sestina, and haiku to organize these experiences. Prose poetry and a peca kucha ground the center of NEC(ROMANTIC) which alternates between lyrical and narrative gestures.

NEC(ROMANTIC) is influenced by Sylvia Plath. The author uses Plath’s methods of compression, …

Nothing Normal Happens To Me: True Stories Of A Journey From Madness To Motherhood, Esther C. Martinez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Written in first person, NOTHING NORMAL HAPPENS TO ME is a memoir in essays that traces the narrator’s journey from self-destruction to creation. Part one encompasses the narrator’s lost years, after she breaks free from the tyranny of her mentally ill mother and goes to live on her own at 17. Part two provides context for those bad girl years, exploring her childhood when she identified with her histrionic mother. Part three comprises stories about the narrator’s years of awakening when she seeks out transcendence, faith, and a family of her own. The pieces vary tonally and stylistically as they …

A Body Outside The Kremlin, James L. May

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A BODY OUTSIDE THE KREMLIN is a historical mystery novel set in the Northern Camps of Special Significance, a Soviet Russian penal institution based in the Solovetsky Archipelago during the 1920s. The protagonist, working first with the camp authorities, then in spite of their disapproval, solves the murder of a fellow prisoner. In the process he improves his position within the camp, while also becoming hardened to the brutal necessities of camp life. Prior to the establishment of the penal camp, the Solovetsky Archipelago was the site of an important Russian Orthodox monastery, and the mystery proves to involve valuables, …

Magic City Gospel, Ashley M. Jones

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Magic City Gospel is a collection of poems that explores themes of race and identity with a special focus on racism in the American South. Many of the poems deal directly with the author’s upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama, the Magic City, and the ways in which the history of that geographical place informs the present. Magic City Gospel confronts race and identity through pop culture, history, and the author’s personal experiences as a black, Alabama-born woman. Magic City Gospel is, in part, influenced by the biting, but softly rendered truth and historical commentary of Lucille Clifton, the laid-back and inventive …

Blotto In The Lifeboat, Paul Christiansen

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Blotto in the Lifeboat is a book of poems that investigates natural processes and idiosyncrasies of human societies. Ranging from the absurd to the scientific in tone, the poems in Blotto in the Lifeboat situate themselves on the blurry-line between fact and imagination, employing a style that Thomas Lux describes as “imaginative realism.”

The middle of three sections is comprised solely of the long poem, “A Compendium of the True and Wondrous,” which collages remarkable facts and anecdotes to highlight the strange realities of the world and the rapidity of change. The first and third sections contain shorter, narrative poems …

Okay Cool No Smoking Love Pony, Annik I. Babinski

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This poetry collection moves from the narrator’s childhood in the marshes of Canada to her coming of age in a new, southern swamp in South Florida. Many of the poems use free verse as well as fairly recent poetic forms like the Golden Shovel and the Pecha Kucha. Others rely on wordplay and nonce forms. Influenced by Hector Veil Temperly, Matthew Zapruder, Dorothea Lasky, Laura Kasischke and Anne Carson, the poems often employ simple language in stream of consciousness, and oscillate between lyric and narrative. These poems are feverish creations inspired by the oracular tradition and induced by the psychic …

The Road From Emmaus, Elizabeth Buro

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

THE ROAD FROM EMMAUS is a collection of 20 personal and lyric essays that explores the narrator’s role as mother and daughter through a close look at significant life events, including her parents’ divorce, a high-risk pregnancy, the death of her father, talking to her daughter for the first time about sex, and accompanying her daughter to the DMV for a learner’s permit. Through examining familial roles and relationships, the narrator’s longing for home emerges as a unifying theme.

The essays in THE ROAD FROM EMMAUS vary in style and tone, from light and funny to serious and probing. The …

Market Value, Christine Morando

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

MARKET VALUE is a collection of stories about people in Southwest Florida struggling to make sense of their lives when faced with shifting economic realities.

The characters in the collection reevaluate their relationships and uncover secrets, forced to navigate a new American landscape of stalled opportunities and uncertain futures. In “Call the Storage King,” Walt assumes that his girlfriend has total faith in their relationship, but accidentally discovers evidence to the contrary. In “Luxury Living,” a resident of a mostly-empty riverfront condo gives a guided tour to a prospective buyer, revealing the building’s short but sordid history along the way. …

Asterisms, Erica N. Kenick

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ASTERISMS is a collection of lyric poetry that seeks to express a sense of awe for the natural world by exploring themes of science, art, and the self. By combining physics and metaphysics, scientific terminology and musings on love, ASTERISMS argues that these seemingly-disparate fields of knowledge can harmonize in unexpected ways.

In its style, the collection draws from the works of Dorianne Laux, Pablo Neruda, and Annie Dillard. Most of the poems are written in free-version and are tied together by images of astronomy and wilderness, both modern and prehistoric. Poems about classical music appear as interludes meant to …

Mothers Of Sparta, Dawn Davies

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mothers of Sparta is a collection of thirteen personal essays that examine place—knowing one’s place, and finding one’s place in the world. The narrative arc chronicles the narrator’s childhood, young adulthood, marriage and child rearing years, ultimately encompassing the difficulties of raising a child who, due to brain damage, faces an uncertain future.

As the narrator grows older, place shifts from a concrete knowledge of the physical world around her, to learning her place within gendered and regional social constructs, and defining her place through roles such as wife, mother, student and writer.

These essays are diverse in style. Woven …