Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Reading Life, Paige Eplin

Literacy Practice and Research

No abstract provided.

Literacy = Human Connection, Julie Luey

Literacy Practice and Research

No abstract provided.

A Poem For Ukraine, Linus Umbrasas, Audra Skukauskaitė

Literacy Practice and Research

No abstract provided.

Little Intangible Wrongdoings, Jaden Gongaware

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

LITTLE INTANGIBLE WRONGDOINGS is a collection of poems that explores the urgency of climate change and pervasiveness of gender bias. The collection’s themes interact with the natural, supernatural, and fictional worlds of television and movies. The speaker explores zeitgeist moments while leaning into the occult, asking the reader to consider topics like memory, time, and spirits. The collection is divided into three sections, with poems being ordered thematically and by form. The first section asserts the feminist speaker and ushers forward contemporary issues of the 21^st century. The second section plays with form, situating the speaker in place at …

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 …

Something American, Carolina S. Souto

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

SOMETHING AMERICAN is a poetry collection written from the perspective of a first-generation American navigating a growing family, a political crisis, and a global pandemic. Influences on this collection include Robert Hass’s THE ESSENTIAL HAIKU and FIELD GUIDE, which attend to nature and the poet-speaker’s immediate surroundings with diligence and precision. Ariel Francisco’s place poems and creative titles in ALL MY HEROES ARE BROKE provide important touchstones for Souto’s commitment to here-and-now writing. And Sylvia Plath’s frank and complex writing about motherhood in ARIEL grants the poet permission to probe these subjects as well.

In SOMETHING AMERICAN, experimental poems sprawl …

No New World, Von Wise Ii

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

NO NEW WORLD is a collection of poetry that follows the establishment, development, and decline of an imagined mid-Atlantic town. Using a blend of historical fact and fiction, the poems open up space for reflection on the historical progress of civilization as a making and unmaking process. The collection explores themes of colonialism, settlement, nature, survival, erasure, civic development, and cyclical forms. The poems take on a variety of styles and tones, shifting between poems from personal life and more oracular poems, creating an oscillation between the human and non-human perspectives that situate and collectively establish the cohesive organism of …

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 …

Bycatch, Terin Weinberg

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

BYCATCH

by

Terin Weinberg

Florida International University, 2021

Miami, Florida

Professor Denise Duhamel, Major Professor

BYCATCH is a collection of poems that explore the speaker’s relationship with the natural world. The poems utilize a variety of forms, from traditional sestinas and sonnets driven by image, to puzzle-pieced stereoscopes that can be read grammatically in three different ways—left to right, or down one of either columns. Though the collection is rooted in nature, the emotional drive is rooted in the construction and deconstruction of the family and the body. Each section of the book will function as …

Objects/Slow Hours, Camila E. Saavedra

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

OBJECTS/SLOW HOURS is a collection of experimental poetry that aims to illustrate the reconfiguration of identity post-trauma. Using spatial play and non-linear storytelling, these poems follow the experiences of a chronic cancer patient through various cycles of illness and recovery. This narrative is told in three interwoven parallel structures, allowing the speaker to project consciousness into objects and animals, while simultaneously revisiting instances of isolated suffering and reflecting on medical treatment procedures.

OBJECTS/SLOW HOURS’s literary influences include Maggie Nelson, Lisa Glatt, and Audre Lorde, whose illness narratives have similarly confronted ideas of embodiment, subjectivity/objectivity, and social (in)visibility. In this collection, …

Growth Theory, Samantha Leon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

GROWTH THEORY reckons with a natural world in distress and imagines what attributes and learnings are needed for the individual to become a more beneficial part of the natural world. What does a person’s interaction with their surroundings say about them, and say about the surroundings? Violence, art, relationships, community are all examined along with the mediums through which we record our reality: speaking, writing, singing, taking photos. Despite covering a breadth of physical places and topics, a central tension that takes place between fear and curiosity colors the manuscript throughout. Poems are ordered by subject or temporal consideration, but …

Switch, Freesia Walsh Mckee

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

SWITCH is a collection of post-confessional feminist poems exploring what it means to be a Millennial, a witness, a woman, a daughter, a dissident, and a student and teacher at the same time. Bookended by two long poems, the poetic-narrative heart of this collection dives into experiences of queer self-actualization, violence, community, family, and love. Narratives about simultaneity, empathy, and politics drive home the message of these poems: the dailiness of our lives is both quotidian and profound.

SWITCH is inspired by writers like Ellen Bass, Audre Lorde, Allison Joseph, June Jordan, Judy Grahn, and Marge Piercy, who’ve used intimate, …

Alive And Possibly Dangerous, Lillian C. Starr

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ALIVE AND POSSIBLY DANGEROUS is a collection of poems interrogating family, sex, and the ever-changing modes of internal living. How do the things we hear when we are young age within us? How do we cope with our biggest fears coming to life? ALIVE AND POSSIBLY DANGEROUS explores, perhaps most importantly, how we come to be the strongest versions of ourselves. Clustered around a sprawling, four-page poem propelled by the phrasing of an internet meme, the poems in this book cover topics from astrology to country line dancing with the same fervent breath.

ALIVE AND POSSIBLY DANGEROUS is interested in …

Heat Waves, Edward Charles Krzeminski

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

HEAT WAVES is a collection of confessional poetry exploring themes of masculinity, maturation, loss, consumerism, the growing disparity between the speaker and his family, and American identity. The collection is divided into three sections. The poems in the first section deal with childhood, friendship, and coming of age in Southwest Florida. The second section deals with family and considers the contrast between the beliefs, educational backgrounds, and career of the speaker’s father and the speaker himself. The final section explores 21^st century America and its issues including environmental damage, consumerism, and alienation.

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. …

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 …

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 …

Offshore, Laurel Nakanishi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

OFFSHORE is a collection of lyric essays that examines the intersections between human cultures and the natural world. The essays inspect issues of identity and belonging in different geographic, cultural, and political landscapes. Part one of the book centers on the cultural and natural landscapes of Hawaii and Japan. Part two explores interpersonal relationships in Montana. And part three focuses on social justice issues in Nicaragua and Florida. Each of the essays in this collection balances intellectual exploration with personal narrative and poetic description, allowing the essays to be simultaneously concept-driven while maintaining lyric force.

Balm Of Gilead, Michael Martin

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

BALM OF GILEAD is a collection of poetry that explores the speaker’s rediscovery of love and spiritual meaning in the years after his recovery from addiction and the loss of a parent. BALM OF GILEAD fits within the English poetic tradition of fastening ineffable sacred experience into more personal lyric modes, an inheritance dating not only to the works of John Donne, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, but to the Psalms of David. The often-confessional poems in BALM OF GILEAD borrow from the free verse and emotional urgency of Denis Johnson; the broken sonnets of Molly Peacock; and the …

Adhans & Orgasms, Emily Jalloul

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ADHANS & ORGASMS is a collection that includes both free verse and prose poetry. The poems shape the Florida landscape as well as cultural aspects of the speaker’s home life, providing insight to the hyphenated space between Arab and American societies. The frequent use of the female perspective and humor inform the speaker of her own past, while portraying a woman at odds with a patriarchal society.

Many of the poems explore the self through pop-culture, sexuality, and heritage. ADHANS & ORGASMS discusses the family unit’s dysfunction as it tries to bridge cultures. Romantic relationships are examined, and many of …

All My Heroes Are Broke, Ariel F. Henriquez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ALL MY HEROES ARE BROKE is a poetry collection written from the perspective of a first generation American coming to terms with the implicit struggles and disillusionment of the American Dream. The first section takes place in New York, both implicitly and explicitly, and serves to introduce the speaker and reveal aspects of his family’s history. The second section takes place in Florida, and continues to further exemplify the speaker’s growing cynicism towards the circumstances of his life, and the peculiar atmosphere of solitude that it creates.

ALL MY HEROES ARE BROKE primarily uses two forms: short, image driven poems …

Rubble & Honey, Megan J. Arlett

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

RUBBLE & HONEY is a collection of poems unified by its use of language driven lyricism to recount personal narratives in the life of the poet. The poems in this manuscript depict the landscapes of California, Florida, Mississippi, the South Downs of England, and Anglesey off the northwest coast of Wales. The manuscript engages with these physical spaces, how the speaker reacts to the natural world and how these locations can reflect the internal. The collection is broken into four sections: the first two explore parting, firstly from a relationship and then revisiting the poet’s childhood landscape of Sussex, England; …

Madonnas, Whores And Other Pilgrims, Barbara Swan

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This group of poems spans the life of the author. The three sections of the book address each part of the title: the visceral and sensory memories of a child; the physical passions and romantic visions of a young to pre-menopausal woman; and finally the reflective wisdom that comes with age.

“Madonnas,” speaks to the fairy tale that is childhood, both the dream and the nightmare aspects. Through the senses and the acquisition of language, these poems speak to the innocence and trust of a child before knowledge and experience show her otherwise.

“Whores,” speaks to the material American dream …

But I Do Remember The Moon, Ellene Glenn Moore

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This poetry collection engages with the mutable nature of memory and its instantiations: memory as artifact, memory as place, memory as story, memory as compulsion. Influenced by the lyric meditations of Robert Hass and Li-Young Lee, the intellectual clarity of Elizabeth Bishop, the place-oriented imagism of Bashō and Gary Snyder, and the reflexive, self-conscious impulse of Sharon Olds, the poems tackle a vast geography of recollection—from Kyoto to the Okefenokee to the turnings and obsessions of the author’s mind itself. Using a sequence of date-stamped prose poems as narrative fence posts, the collection addresses multiple modalities in memory by weaving …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …