Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nights In The City Beautiful, Veronica Suarez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nights in The City Beautiful is a collection of confessional, free verse poems that explores sexual trauma, mental health, the exigencies of marriage, and the complexities of human desire. These interconnected poems are grounded with a braided narrative and tackle taboo themes. In Part 1: Monogamy, the reader journeys into the world of Vincent and Victoria, their profound love, and their anxiety disorders. In Part 2: Polyamory, Victoria gets caught in a love triangle when she meets her publishing coworker, Peter Langley.

The book evokes the movement of Romanticism and first-and-second-generation Romantic poets such as William Blake and Lord Byron. …

Mandala Springs, Juleen Collins

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS MANDALA SPRINGS by Juleen Collins Florida International University, 2018 Miami, Florida Professor Debra Dean, Major Professor MANDALA SPRINGS is the small town setting for a story that explores the nature of secrets, lies, revelations, and the damage each can cause. The narrative follows Bodhi MacLachlan, a young woman who struggles with Borderline Personality Disorder, back to the psychiatric hospital where she has resided in-patient multiple times. The long-term association with her psychiatrist becomes complicated when she reveals details of her affair with a secretive man. Meanwhile, she becomes obsessed with uncovering the mysteries of the relationship …

Ambient Light: Essays On Marriage, Motherhood, And Mental Health, Bonnie Losak

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

AMBIENT LIGHT: ESSAYS ON MARRIAGE, MOTHERHOOD, AND MENTAL

HEALTH is a collection of ten personal and lyric essays interspersed with poems

that speak to the subject or tone of the essay that follows. These essays examine

the narrator’s experiences as mother, wife, and daughter, and explore the manner

in which the different roles bleed into one another. The narrator’s impending

divorce and the events that coalesce around it shape these essays into a coherent

whole.

In the spirit of Brenda Miller’s lyric essays, the essays collected in AMBIENT

LIGHT: ESSAYS ON MARRIAGE, MOTHERHOOD, AND MENTAL HEALTH, use

rich, imagistic language …

North Atlantic Black, Chazz R. Chitwood

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

North Atlantic Black is a collection of contemplative, lyrical poems that explore issues of coming out, suicide, yearning, and male relationships.

Woven together, North Atlantic Black moves through different questions of masculinity encountered by the poet through the process of coming out. Early poems explore themes of masks, of theater, and of dressing and costume as means of escaping the traditional bounds of masculinity

North Atlantic Black further braids in concepts of home, how they relate to identity through heritage and expectation, and how they inform the poet’s thoughts on what it means for men to have relationships—how ideas of …

Two Ways Of Burning A Cotton Field, David James Lindstrom

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD is an ethnographic memoir concerning the narrator’s experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, South America. The plot is structured around a moral crisis in his rural Paraguayan village. The narrator’s neighbor, a man in his late twenties, threatened to kill his partner and her two children. The Paraguayan police were made aware of the situation but did nothing. Peace Corps management also instructed the narrator to do nothing.

In TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD, this moral crisis is explored within the contexts of post-colonial power structures, including economic and …

The Greatest Is Love, Leslie Charles Taylor

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

THE GREATEST IS LOVE is a collection of ten short stories showing the painful manifestations of romantic relationships in the lives of contemporary American characters from many walks of life.

As in the stories of D.H. Lawrence, these characters are often driven towards what may be bad for them, finding that love overrides their rational thoughts. In “The Mechanic” a woman whose legal career has left her isolated becomes irresistibly attracted to her friend’s ex-husband. Three stories center on one character, Charles, whose early failures both in college and at work lead him to become a detective, only to be …

The Room You Just Left, Bertha I. Crombet

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

THE ROOM YOU JUST LEFT is a poetry collection written from the perspective of a female speaker as she navigates relationships, culture, and identity via the lens of the Cuban-American experience. The collection is divided into three sections: Paleotempestology, Machete, and Saturn Returning. The first illustrates the often turbulent nature of romantic relationships, the second highlights the speaker’s culture, and the third is a singular long poem offering both insights and questions about what it means to arrive at the age of twenty-seven.

The collection is composed of free verse, prose, experimental, and formal poetry, and includes code-switching to illuminate …

This Terrible Silence, Jeff Bonar

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This Terrible Silence is a collection of nineteen stand-alone stories. The work largely focuses on characters on the fringe of society—alcoholics, gamblers, thieves, liars, cheaters, and loners, who feel trapped or destined to repeat their troubles. In the struggle to break free, either by self-fulfillment or outside interference, these stories showcase the characters’ hearts and wills in the face of often daunting or insurmountable desperation.

The stories in this collection are influenced by the work of Raymond Carver, and the Dirty Realism of Larry Brown, Breece DJ Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips, and others. With minimal exposition, the characters are laid …