Creative Writing Commons^™

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 …

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 …