Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Don't Be Another Girl, Brittany M. Owens

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

DON’T BE ANOTHER GIRL is a collection of poetry that braids together themes of familial relationships, death, abuse, mental illness, feminism, and attempts at healing. These free-verse and prose poems use pop culture, politics, and elements of nature as vehicles to explore and reject the violence of the western white patriarchy. In the first section the speaker questions the curses that flow out from bloodlines—genetic traits, behaviors, and gender expectations. The second section utilizes lyrical prose blocks that thread together trauma and sleep paralysis, following an emotionally immobilized speaker who struggles to step off a dangerous escalator, away from toxic …

Girl With Broken Car Sings, Brianne M. Griffith

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

GIRL WITH BROKEN CAR SINGS is a full-length collection of free verse poems that explore an obsession with celebrity status, culture, and power; the speaker longs for and imagines new lives for herself, all the while examining the wickedness of American commercialism and capitalism through a reality TV lens.

Pop culture is also used as a vehicle to discuss familial trauma. The gaps in the speaker’s life are filled with mainstream media references. GIRL WITH BROKEN CAR SINGS considers how people engage with media to understand or “see” themselves in the world.

While there are no sections in GIRL WITH …