Poetry 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 …

No New World, Von Wise Ii

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

NO NEW WORLD is a collection of poetry that follows the establishment, development, and decline of an imagined mid-Atlantic town. Using a blend of historical fact and fiction, the poems open up space for reflection on the historical progress of civilization as a making and unmaking process. The collection explores themes of colonialism, settlement, nature, survival, erasure, civic development, and cyclical forms. The poems take on a variety of styles and tones, shifting between poems from personal life and more oracular poems, creating an oscillation between the human and non-human perspectives that situate and collectively establish the cohesive organism of …

Girl With Broken Car Sings, Brianne M. Griffith

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

GIRL WITH BROKEN CAR SINGS is a full-length collection of free verse poems that explore an obsession with celebrity status, culture, and power; the speaker longs for and imagines new lives for herself, all the while examining the wickedness of American commercialism and capitalism through a reality TV lens.

Pop culture is also used as a vehicle to discuss familial trauma. The gaps in the speaker’s life are filled with mainstream media references. GIRL WITH BROKEN CAR SINGS considers how people engage with media to understand or “see” themselves in the world.

While there are no sections in GIRL WITH …

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 …

Objects/Slow Hours, Camila E. Saavedra

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

OBJECTS/SLOW HOURS is a collection of experimental poetry that aims to illustrate the reconfiguration of identity post-trauma. Using spatial play and non-linear storytelling, these poems follow the experiences of a chronic cancer patient through various cycles of illness and recovery. This narrative is told in three interwoven parallel structures, allowing the speaker to project consciousness into objects and animals, while simultaneously revisiting instances of isolated suffering and reflecting on medical treatment procedures.

OBJECTS/SLOW HOURS’s literary influences include Maggie Nelson, Lisa Glatt, and Audre Lorde, whose illness narratives have similarly confronted ideas of embodiment, subjectivity/objectivity, and social (in)visibility. In this collection, …