Creative Writing Commons^™

Sunbaby, Katelyn Eva Garcia

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Above all else, Sunbaby is a project concerned with that which is passed down from a mother to her daughters. Less interested in writing into the center of violent acts, this series of poems aims instead to consider all the things – both physical and psychological – that exist of the edges of violence. What happens to a body in the wake of violent acts? What informs the trauma of families? These are questions Sunbaby asks its reader to grapple with.

Set to background of the desert and mountain West, Sunbaby lingers on bodies (human and other) subjected to environmental …

The Changing, Sabrina B. Black

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In poems that center on experiences of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, The Changing explores the formation of identity and the malleability of the self. Sabrina Black writes into the spaces between people—at times finding connection there and at times isolation. Throughout the collection, the speaker reflects on complicated relationships with family members, classmates, and friends; on the ways those relationships have shaped her; and, most of all, on her relationship with that elusive thing called the self.

In a series of “Dear Advice Columnist” poems scattered throughout the manuscript, Black shifts focus away from personal experience, adopting the persona …

Other Orchards, Sam B. Robison

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Other Orchards is comprised of poems each suspect in their own way of those boundaries that might separate humans from nature, rural from urban, worker from scholar, or human from beast. Using the figure of the orchard, a kind of “false forest,” this collection studies the ways we map ourselves onto our work and the way work might inform an understanding of the self. Ultimately, these are poems that emerge from the seams of things—the shoulder of highway strewn with dead antelope, the feral apple tree lost to the woods, the farmer lost in their work, slowing becoming less and …