Arts and Humanities Commons^™

There Was Confusion, Carter Cumbo

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

This collection is about a young man with an overactive mind trying to make sense of life in early recovery from alcoholism. It focuses on the reckoning of his past, how it appears to go with him into the present, and the relationships that exist on the periphery of his adamant self- examination. It is about the realization that his obsessive process of self-examination, and desperation for answers to life’s universal questions, pale in comparison to the wisdom of his own lived experience. It is a journey through current and past life and the reckoning of a confused mind.

Follow The Shimmer, Meghan Bradbury

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Follow the Shimmer is a creative thesis collection of poems and songs that explore the depths of trauma, love, and healing. Told through the lens of fairy tale and fantasy, it is a story of grief and hope. Some of the tales are familiar, others are strange and abstract. Fables and nursery rhymes are remixed by the hands of a daughter who wishes for her deceased mother's touch. Archetypes and mythology are scrambled through the kaleidoscopic eyes of a woman who survives the violence of a patriarchal society. The world becomes a landscape of dangerous yet magical realms to discover; …

Bones I Found In The Garden, Alena Indigo Anne Sullivan

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

This collection is a volume of small, intimate moments portrayed in both poetry and prose. Rather than grand, operatic plots telling convoluted stories, this work speaks of the magic in simple things, looking in at personal (and often difficult) moments—the process of finding the beauty in ugly things, finding the crumbs of human emotion that slip through the cracks—lending them the attention they are due but often fail to receive. This collection digs up potsherds of childhood trauma, bones of old romances, and ghosts of things that will never be, all presented to the reader through the lens of fantasy. …

Everyhere, Everythere, Maxene Kuppermann-Guiñals

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Food and people are arguably the poetic commonalities among us all. We eat together; we dine together, we snack together. Wherever we are on the planet, we derive pleasure from the source of our singular and communal energy. We share our food in the most intimate process: what sustains me I give to you to sustain yourself. We love when people appreciate what we have given them, and we are grateful when someone gives their food, or their poems, to us. They become expressions of love.

Food, and poetry, has a complexity of understanding and acceptance. What do we eat? …

A Poet In Space: Identity Construction Through Hybridity, Jonathan Pessant

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

William Carlos Williams wrote: A poem is a small Machine made of words. Poetry and the STEM fields are no different when each discipline attempts to find meaning in the world, when each creates something beautiful through experimentation. STEM has the scientific method, with inductive and deductive reasoning, and the laws of nature while English has rhetorical style and grammatical structure. With a little imagination, hybridity between these two seemingly different discourses can produce new perspectives within each, and for each. These new perspectives could lead to new questions which would not have been imagined separately. This hybridity may be …

Black In Maine, Joseph Nathadus Jackson Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Black in Maine is a collection of poetry composed around the narrative of poetry being used as a source of liberation and rehabilitation for incarcerated persons. The poems find several protagonists self-reflecting or speaking to an assumed audience about their experiences as prisoners within the Maine Department of Corrections.

Crisis Across The Dog-Starred Verse: Tales Of Heroism, Horror, And Apocalypse, David Arroyo

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Crisis Across the Dog-Starred Verse: Tales of Heroism, Horror, and Apocalypse is a collection of formal and free-verse poems. Although a few pieces are confessional in nature, many of the poems borrow from the genres of speculative fiction: horror and science fiction specifically. The thesis is not divided into sections, rather it alternates visions of a confessional real world and fantasy space. Many poems cover the death of my dog and our adventures in the multiverse, while others like “Together We Are Monsters” are meditations on monsters and pornography. Two longer pieces, however, “Campus of the 21st Century,” and “The …

Fire In The Garden, Troy A. Myers Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Fire in the Garden is a collection of poems primarily confessional in nature that deal with changes during mid-life: moving to a new house, having a son go to college and the subsequent abandonment of the marriage by one partner. The biographical experiences are often accompanied by landscape details taken from the garden and yard of the new house where the speaker lives.

Her Name Is Quintana Roo: Essays, Poetry, Memoir, Linda Q. Lambert Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Her name is Quintana Roo is a collection of essays, poetry, and memoir through the lens of the author's experience as a child, mother, wife, journalist, and librarian. The dominant thread is the establishment of a septuagenarian's enchantment with words and writing.

Eyre, Andrea Lesley Adams Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Charlotte Bronte's semi-autobiographical 1847 novel Jane Eyre is the source inspiration for EYRE, an illustrated adaptation . EYRE takes the protagonist Jane, an orphaned governess, and places her in a fantastical construct which bridges the worlds of 19th century Japan and England. Jane's story becomes one of an unexpected warrior battling the dark demons of alienation and desire which populate her psyche. Characters are reinterpreted as mythological creatures from within the Japanese spiritual pantheon.

No Invented Mystery, Blake Love Mfa

All Student Scholarship

This collection of poems is comprised of many recollected experiences that are personally revealing about me, both as poet and person. I often explore the dynamics of domesticity between queer men and detail the dissolution of coming together with another. Laughter as a means of subverting or avoiding trauma is a theme that runs throughout my thesis. It is intended to be read like one might view a mosaic. The narrative threads tie together by its end to tell a story that speaks to a sense of abjection and otherness many of us carry. To temper the intensity of the …

Coming To Terms, Kathleen Cerveny Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Coming to Terms, by Kathleen Cerveny, is a collection of poems exploring loss: of a long-term romantic relationship, of parents, and of youth. Taken together, the poems describe a journey through a range of emotions and the missteps and triumphs along the way. Dreams figure importantly in the collection. Dream-culled imagery is used to explore and express what is often hidden, suppressed, or actively denied in the face of loss. Sound and rhythm are consistent lyric elements throughout as are the use of assonance, alliteration, slant and internal rhyme. There is attention paid, but not slavish adherence to, metrical patterns. …