Creative Writing Commons^™

Illusions Of Safety: Poems, Stephanie Elaine Dugger

Doctoral Dissertations

The poems in Illusions of Safety bear witness to growing up on a farm in Alabama and how rural life—whether traumatic or romantic—influences a narrator who falls outside of her family’s norms. In their attempt to investigate the complexities of the notion of safety, the poems primarily rely on space (and the conflicting ideals of both security and splintering associated with space) by developing the space on the page through form and by juxtaposing city with country, fields with rooms, and the West with the South. The poems seek to understand what is safe, what can be safe, what should …