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Poetry

2023

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Desert Body, Lauren Mckinnon May 2023

Desert Body, Lauren Mckinnon

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis is a collection of poems examining certain paradoxes of my body. As a survivor of sexual violence, my body relives trauma which makes it feel uninhabitable. I compare my experiences with the Southern Utah desert. The physical beauty, destruction and inhabitability of the desert teaches me to accept my body as both beautiful and full of grief. The poems move chronologically through my life, beginning with an abusive relationship at the age of sixteen, a move to Moab at nineteen, and becoming a mother at twenty-five. Ultimately, with the desert as my guide, I learn to accept my …


The Body Seeking Magnificence, Taylor Franson Thiel May 2023

The Body Seeking Magnificence, Taylor Franson Thiel

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis focuses on how my time as a college athlete, my relationship with my mother, and my experience of an abusive relationship have intersected to impact my personal relationship with my body as I have fluctuated between trying to make it perfect, trying to ruin it, and trying to love it. The collection of poems examines how these forces collided in various ways to change how I thought about myself and my identity. After dealing with the idealized version of what a college athlete should look like and act like, inherited trauma from a mother, and trauma from a …