Creative Writing Commons^™

On Being Seen Or For Those Who Break Like Me, Shanisha K. Branch

English Theses & Dissertations

The nature of truly seeing is something I’ve had a hard time grappling with. If you understand the difficultly of seeing and wanting others to see you that same, then these pages are for you.

Pangaea, Nishat Manzoor Ahmed

English Theses & Dissertations

Pangaea is a collection of poems that revolve around themes of race, culture, identity, religion, faith, mental illness, death, and love. The themes in Pangaea aim to pinpoint the where all these ideas intersect in the body and the heart, each theme a continent on its own right coming together to make the overall landmass of human existence. In Pangaea, I am asking to find the root of urgency that drives one to love, to hate, to feel. This thesis is an attempt at unearthing that root.

Permanent Resident, Joshua Mcgarry

English Theses & Dissertations

This thesis emerges out of the author’s own experiences as a permanent resident of the USA in a time of increasing tension towards immigrants. As the poems progress they deal not only with the immediate political concerns, but also with the familial issues of living on another continent as the poems address the way distance adds an extra layer of strain the death of the author’s grandfather in early 2016.

The thesis attempts to find a counterpoint to the increased sense of nationalism and distance through the use of music as a plane of aesthetic engagement that goes beyond nation. …

Mexican Bingo, Amanda Michelle Galvan Huynh

English Theses & Dissertations

This collection of poetry is an elegy for what I have lost and what I have left behind in order to reach this point in my education. These poems attempt to be a witness to the Latinx community who migrated across Texas for field work, for a better future, and for their children. The collection is meant to communicate the loss of culture, generational differences, familial struggles, assimilation, health, womanhood, and trauma. While these poems are not all encompassing, they are a beginning and a way for me to better understand my role as a poet.

Explaining Poetry To The Open Heart, Matthew Wayne Larrimore

English Theses & Dissertations

“Explaining Poetry to the Open Heart” is a creative writing thesis of poetry. It makes use of lyric and narrative poems that utilize sound, imagery, and other creative devices in order to communicate the narrator’s relationships with place, others, and self to the reader. A shifting point of view alternately restricts and expands the reader’s perspective in order to direct attention toward the reader’s own perceptions of the narrator, the world, and ultimately herself.

Versus Los Angeles, Thomas Vincent Kelly

English Theses & Dissertations

The poems included in this manuscript construct, explore, and interrogate hyper reality and how it affects the twenty-first century. Simultaneously creating and destroying representations of a world made in the image of electronic entertainment, Versus Los Angeles inhabits various pop-culture personas in order to illustrate loss of identity, fame as commodity, the erosion of language, and the politics these various icons or platforms promote.

In The Blooming Red, Elaine White

English Theses & Dissertations

My thesis is a hybrid text that incorporates both poems and nonfiction essays. It essentially functions as one very long, very unusual narrative. Though the works in the thesis incorporate multiple locations, both in the US and abroad, the manuscript begins and ends in central Indiana. The best way I can describe what happens in between to say it is an exploration of trauma, mental illness, and what healing sometimes looks like. Though much of what is contained here has been called “dark” and “visceral,” I don’t like to leave it at that. Instead, I see the potential for these …

Hoarfrost, Mae Lynn Wallker

English Theses & Dissertations

Many of the poems in this collection reflect an engagement with an inherited literary tradition of ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebraic mythologies. The first section, entitled "Flint," deals with the ancient text of the Bible and with biblical and religious landscapes. The second section, "'The Seven," based on Aeschylus' The Seven Against Thebes, explores the possibilities of the reinterpretation and elaboration of an ancient story in a contemporary context. While "The Seven" literally refers to the seven gates at Thebes, the number is random, and does in fact represent an infinite number of stories. The penultimate section, "Hoarfrost," explores the …