Arts and Humanities Commons^™

My Last Concussion, Shannon Valkr

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

MY LAST CONCUSSION is a thesis consisting of a critical introduction, a number of poetic influences, and a collection of poems. The introduction touches on the themes of the collection, my personal history with my subject, my changing approach to poetry, and a brief evaluation of the work as a whole. It details my approach to Catholicism, paganism, transgender identity, and oppression. My work grapples with both my current understanding of myself and my inability to enunciate my reality in the past. I aim to view divinity and personal history through a lens of queerness.

Advisor: Kwame Dawes

Lessons In Persistence, Syble Heffernan

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

LESSONS IN PERSISTENCE is a thesis that operates within the tradition of writing about trauma and resilience, taking up themes of mental illness, class, colonialism, loss of a parent, navigating queerness in a conservative Christian context, and reckoning with gender-based violence and expectations directed toward people socialized as women. The use of ecopoetics highlights the relationship between traumas to the earth brought about by climate change, war, and worldwide suffering, and those brought upon the human body (specifically marginalized bodies) by grief, illness, abuse, and the loss of self. The collection ultimately aims to establish explicit connections between internal and …

Ten Poems, Bianca Swift

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

TEN POEMS is a thesis consisting of a critical introduction meditating on what it means to create joyful poetry and how community shapes a body of work, as well as a collection of poems. The essay discusses my background in poetry and the many voices responsible for the final body of work.

Advisor: Hope Wabuke

Fifteen Poems, Caleb Petersen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

FIFTEEN POEMS is a thesis consisting of a critical introduction on the development of my understanding of craft, the poetic influences which have shaped my poetry, as well as a collection of poems. The essay addresses both the form and content of the collection, as well as my history with poetry. It provides details about the process of creating this collection, and it portrays some of the vision that motivates it. The poetry which follows is a reflection on myself, my body, and my landscape, as I ask the question, who am I in this place? Situated in Lincoln, Nebraska, …

What She Became?, Sarwa Abdulghafoor

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

WHAT SHE BECAME? is a thesis comprised of a thirteen- page introduction and 35 poems. As is evident from the title, the poems are about the poet’s unsettling personal and creative journey, as well as her personal movements, her traumatic childhood, her individual and cultural backgrounds. The author takes her readers through the experiences of women in war-torn Iraqi Kurdistan from the early 80s to the present day. Her poetry gives you a glimpse of life under a patriarchal regime that attempts to stifle women’s voices. The introduction dives deeper into her own personal history as a female Kurdish writer, …

The Motions Of Burying, Jessica Poli

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

THE MOTIONS OF BURYING is a thesis comprised of 52 pages of poems and a five page introduction that explores personal connections to physical space and landscape. The poems included in this manuscript are representative of the places I’ve called home: the woods of Pennsylvania, where I grew up; barns and pastures in Central New York, where I spent several years working on small family farms; and the wide sky over Holmes Lake in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I now reside.

Woven, Adrienne Christian

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Woven is a collection of love poems about people of African descent, all of which feature clothing in some prominent way.

The why of what one wears runs deep. This creative work explores that connection.

Advisor: Kwame Dawes

A Pint Of Dirt, Kristen Friesen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This collection of poetry consists of 50 pieces focused on events and observations experienced by the author: a midwestern, middle-aged teacher, wife, and mother of three now-grown daughters. As much as it is an attempt to process and package the ordinary and unexplainable, it is also a study in metaphor, description, and the ways in which specificity of time and place can, hopefully, render a piece universal.

Advisor: Stacey Waite

Burnt Lavender & Other Remnants, Danielle Airen Pringle

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following is an essay on the craft of poetry. It talks about influences for poetry writing including other poets, history, music, and the poet’s personal life, as well as the process of writing poetry throughout the poet’s life. The work focuses on how her poetry has developed and what she is trying to accomplish with her poetry in regards to women, power, and desire. The poems are usually persona poems written from the perspectives of medieval women (either real or imagined) and a few of her own personal poems. A sample of some of the poems are included here. …

Vistor Parking Only, Jeremy Caldwell

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

VISITOR PARKING ONLY is a thesis comprised of 40 poems and a fifteen-page introduction that travels simultaneously through the climatic seasons and familial generations, creating a cyclical effect of inevitable loss and regrowth. The poems start in late spring, early summer and dive into adolescent wonder, vulnerable, and loss of innocence. Gradually as the seasons change so does the speaker, diving into young adulthood and parenting and the sense of responsibility, guilt, and confusion that has played such a large role in developing me as a person. The poems transition into the winter months where older generations, such as my …

The Only Way Forward, Michael Reed

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Only Way Forward is a creative thesis with a combination of Poetry and Fiction. There is a short introduction that shows the form and styles Michael has used as well as his back story into the creative writing world. He talks about many different authors that have helped him through his journey as well as many other peers and mentors. His biggest take away with his education is to “Just Keep Writing.”

Things I Haven't Told You, Kimberly A. Tedrow

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Things I Haven’t Told You is a three-part thesis that consists of a critical introduction, a creative sample of ten poems, and an essay on using the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley as a creative prompt.

A critical introduction to the creative sample discusses the contextualization of memory, the observation of the physical world, and the rare metaphysical moments that occur in an ordinary life. The genesis and evolution of the work is explored, as well as the poet's development during the course of graduate study.

The creative sample of ten poems includes poems that articulate the malleable relationship between …

Leaving Myself Behind, Shea Montgomery

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This work presents poems detailing different events of my life in an almost chronological order, while at the same time juxtaposing them against the backdrop of a life changing car accident I suffered through when I was 21. The events detailed within the poems reflect moments in my life that occurred either before or after this car accident, and I have arranged them in such a way that I hope will show my own struggles with masculinity while growing up, while at the same time realizing my own mortality by the end.

The poems contained within this work detail my …

Poets Don't Ride Motorcycles, Andrew G. Tully

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This is a collection of poems that focus more on minutia and happenstance than larger universal themes. Using free-form lines and stanzas, spare construction, and dark yet powerful imagery, these poems remind readers of the meaningful emotional impact everyday items and interactions can have. The extraordinary and unusual are important too, and form a stark contrast to the poems about the mundane. These poems are not meant to be a final collection, but are a solid base for a book-length manuscript that will expand on the themes, images, and stories contained in this thesis.

Adviser: Kwame Dawes

Midwestern Mythologies, Adam Lee Hubrig

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This collection of poems works toward unpacking the complications of moving from one geographical center to another. Its poems aim to work out changing and strained relationships, expectations and environments.

Advisor: Kwame Dawes

Imaginary You, Joshua A. Ware

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Imaginary You is a multi-genre collection subdivided into three sections: “Impossible Motels,” “Imaginary Portraits,” and “Writing through Nightwood.” One of the manuscript’s main concerns is the exploration of an in-between space formed by the conflation of real and imagined experience. More specifically, the writing puts pressure on Wallace Stevens’ aphorisms, as stated in his Adagia, that “In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality,” and “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a …