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Epilogue: Every Þrose Has Its Thorn On Poison, The Cure, And Other Pharmacological Prickles; Or, Why Are You So Far Away?, David Ben-Merre Ph.D., Manu Samriti Chander Ph.D.

English Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Creative Energies: Unearthing The Role Of Romantic Ecocriticism, Nicole Marie Chambers-Stahl

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The literary field of ecocriticism has transcended the boundaries of Academia: excited to connect to their physical environments, many of these scholars are focusing on genres like place-based writing, rhetoric of energy policy, and representations of the Earth in film and media. Interdisciplinary by nature, ecocriticism has demonstrated clear potential in its ability to intersect with concentrations like the history of science, animal studies, and environmental justice.

However, as the language around global crises is heating up —“Today it is scientists, not prophets,” writes Tobias Menely in “‘The Present Obfuscation,’” “who speak the language of apocalypse” (478)—ecocritical scholarship is at …

Our Defender In Battle, Garrett S. "Faustino" Miller Oblsb

Obsculta

"Our Defender in Battle" is a fictional poem about an event not contained within the biblical scriptures. It tells about the coming of St. Michael the Archangel to aid in protecting humanity after the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man.

Milk Tooth, 2025, Eddie Anderson, Sadie House, Jay Clark, Ravyn Oliver, Edwin Mayo, Joseph Kettelhodt, Kaitlyn Seibel, Daniel Mcnellis, Elise Fladeboe, Ivy Matejcek, Trinity Johnson, Eve Gwendolyn Hansen, Liz Fisher, Emma Niessink, Hannah Lewis

Milk Tooth

"Writings by Bemidji State University Students". Sponsored by the Bemidji State University English Department.

Ferocious (And Tender) Survival, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

A review of Blood Loss: a Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art, by Keiko Lane (Duke University Press, 2024) in the Anarchist Review of Books

Luis Cernuda En El Exilio Y Análisis De Dos Poemas Cernudianos Tardíos, Mary S. Vásquez

The Coastal Review

The Spanish poet Luis Cernuda was viewed by most of his contemporaries in the brilliant generation of poets of 1927 as closed, cold, removed from them and from the explosive issues of that period. Once the tragic Spanish Civil War began in 1936, however, Cernuda was of very few Spanish intellectuals to to fight in the trenches in defense of the Republic. He also worked alongside Lorca and others in the Misiones Pedagógicas, which brought culture to the humble people to whom it belonged. María Teresa León wrote a passionate defense of the solidarity of Cernuda. The poet left Spain …

What I Was And Who I Am, And Before And After, Molly K. Del Rossi

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis begins with a critical introduction which analyzes varying forms—such as the inverted sonnet—the schools of confessional and post-confessional poetry—and how they differ—and inspiration used for my creative work in poetry. I claim to be a poet who writes primarily based on personal memories. I chronicle my initial encounters with poetry as a teenager through the lens of confessionalism, as demonstrated by Eavan Boland and Anne Sexton. To exhibit my gained knowledge, I reference poetic theorists such as Richard Hugo, Charles Olson, Adrienne Rich, Mary Ruefle, and Gertrude Stein when analyzing which theories and dialogues influence my poetic style. …

Revolutionary Worldmaking: James Monroe Whitfield’S Poems In Martin Delany’S Blake; Or, The Huts Of America, Magdalena Zapędowska

Jacobson Center: Publications

Martin Delany’s Blake, serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861–62, includes five unattributed poems from James Monroe Whitfield’s volume America and Other Poems, which appear in the novel as compositions of the Cuban revolutionary poet Placido. Largely overlooked in scholarship on Blake, Whitfield/Placido’s poems are crucial to the impending revolt of the oppressed because they foster a collective emancipatory consciousness and model, through poetic form, the meticulous organization on which the revolution relies for success. Resonating with other poems and songs quoted in the novel, they speak to broader questions of poetry’s role in building communities of resistance. In turn, …

Self-Preservation: Autobiography As A Form Of Archivization As Seen Through The Life And Poetic Works Of John Clare, Meghan J. Slaff

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This paper will look at how the processing efforts of an archivist mirror that of an autobiographer through the shared motivation of adding to the cultural memory or textual canon of a society. For archival purposes, the typical steps of ingesting, preparing, and presenting a collection are creation, capture, arrangement/description, and pluralization. To create an autobiography, writers take the memories that have been created and experienced due to events in their lives and capture those memories via recording in the literary form known as autobiography. These autobiographers then arrange and describe their memories in a way that shows vast similarities …

Robert Frost And The Myth Of Adam And Eve, Theo Johnson

CMC Senior Theses

What exactly it is about the story of Adam and Eve that fascinated Robert Frost is hard to say. Of course, he is not the first to engage with it in writing – for much of recorded human history, the Genesis account of man’s creation has held a place of unparalleled importance in our understanding of what it is to be human, provoking innumerable exegetic responses. In popular literature, too, it has served as inspiration for some of the most celebrated English and American poems. From the “bloodless myth” of Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis” to the great theodicy of John Milton’s …

The Girl Who Drowned The Whole World, Sophia Saco

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

THE GIRL WHO DROWNED THE WHOLE WORLD investigates the consequences of loneliness. Upon returning to her hometown, the speaker, Cucú, reckons with the fact she no longer has a place amongst her friends and past. Her frustrations manifest as a Biblical flooding, leaving her the only person alive in the world. She embarks on a journey of coping whilst reframing her sudden penance as a baptism.

Through motifs of alchemy and Catholicism, hermit crab forms, and reflections on young adulthood, THE GIRL WHO DROWNED THE WHOLE WORLD contemplates how everyone can better themselves in difficult circumstances.

Written as prose poems, …

3rd Grade Religion, Brooke Standish

Inscape

Brooke Stanish is a writer from Sunrise, Florida, and an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing Program at Louisiana State University. Her work appears in America, The Windhover, The Rectangle, Whale Road Review, Living Waters Review, Time of Singing, Green Blotter, Manzano Mountain Review, and other publications.

Field Of View, Douglas Fritock

Inscape

After spending many years on the East Coast, Douglas Fritock now lives with his family in Redondo Beach, California but still pines away for snow. Previously a tobacco chemist, he has since given up the dark arts and now spends his days driving carpool, tending native - plants, swinging kettlebells, and working on poems. His work has previously appeared in Little Patuxent Review and is forthcoming in Ponder Review and Puerto del Sol.

To Make A Home Of Time, Alexa Brockamp Hoggatt

Inscape

Alexa Brockamp Hoggatt is a poet and programmer from Tacoma, Washington. Although there is endless machine to rage against, Alexa writes poetry as a sort of running list of reasons humans deserve to go on existing: The tenderness, the shared experience, the soft parts. Her dad woke up every morning after coughing through the night from breathing sand and dust at work and said “It’s another perfect day” and that is what she wants her poems to say: Even if you have sand in your lungs, it’s another perfect day.

Wake, Carolyn Oliver

Inscape

Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize), and three chapbooks. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Image, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, Prelude, Consequence, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts.

Sequin, Rose Demaris

Inscape

Rose DeMaris’s poetry appears in Image, New England Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She received Orison Books’ Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry in 2022 and the 2024 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, and she was a Best New Poets nominee in 2023. She holds advanced degrees in English and Native American Studies as well as an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow. She lives, writes, and wanders in Montana.

Stingray, Christopher Stewart

Inscape

Christopher Stewart is the author of What Came After (The Calliope Group) and co-author (with Quraysh Ali Lansana) of The Walmart Republic (Mongrel Empire Press). His poems have appeared in RHINO, Bellevue Literary Review, Plainsongs, Oberon, Connecticut River Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2025 RHINO Poetry Founder’s Prize.

The Fishmonger, Jeremy Radin

Inscape

Jeremy Radin is a writer and actor. His poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Poema- Day, Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Sun, Only Poems, and elsewhere. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Belly God (Orison Books, forthcoming 2026, selected by Ellen Bass), Dear Sal (Not A Cult, 2022), Slow Dance with Sasquatch (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). As an actor, he has worked extensively in theater, film and tv. He lives in New York, where he likes to sit in the park and point at birds.

Crocuses, Holly Castleton

Inscape

Holly Castleton is a master’s student at the University of Edinburgh studying Creative Writing. She has an MA in Religion and Literature and graduated from BYU with a major in English in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Rue Scribe by Underwood Press. She loves to read, eat, and practice yoga.

Ode To Sounds I Hear Only In Iran, Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad

Inscape

Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad is a poet and attorney. Her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and New England Review among others. She won the 2019 LUMINA La Lengua contest and the 2016 Pinch Literary Prize, and is a Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets nominee. Her work can be found at www.mt-poet.com.

Ode To The Maidenhair Tree, Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad

Inscape

Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad is a poet and attorney. Her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and New England Review among others. She won the 2019 LUMINA La Lengua contest and the 2016 Pinch Literary Prize, and is a Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets nominee. Her work can be found at www.mt-poet.com.

Isfahan, Half The World, Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad

Inscape

Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad is a poet and attorney. Her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and New England Review among others. She won the 2019 LUMINA La Lengua contest and the 2016 Pinch Literary Prize, and is a Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets nominee. Her work can be found at www.mt-poet.com.

Mercy Is All The Body Wants, Michael Imossan

Inscape

Michael Imossan is a poet, playwright, and editor of Ibibio origin.

Watchpeopledie . Tv, Noah Lebien

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis piece is a performance called watchpeopledie.tv performed four times at the Anderson Gallery in the Hidden Galleries. There are two rooms in the gallery. The first room is where the audience enters. There is a line on the floor marking that the audience is not to move further into the first room or into the second room. The audio consists of verbatim comments sourced from videos of violence against trans people from the website watchpeopledie.tv, a website in which users post real videos of shootings, suicides, car accidents, etc. The main text, which is my thesis writing below, …

What's It Like, Jon Merrill

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

What’s it like

Not training to kill another human being at 18

Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit.

Damaged Goods, Jesse Huckins

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

"I’m ready to go back now // to a place that’s far away-"

Short poem about home, and returning to it.

The Filament, Elena Skibicki

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Filament weaves together the results of a neurodivergent person exploring their universe, in all its harrowing beauty and familiar tragedy. The speaker traverses oceans and thunderstorms, wades through the swampy shallows of their high school, participates in a pharmaceutical supply chain and its subsequent ransacking, floats through altered mental states, and retells legends, spanning many styles while still using the lyric “I”. Scrying into a nebulous future, the speaker returns with stories of the planet and its people, and the kind of world they want to build.

The speaker exposes their ghosts throughout the collection, hoping that the adage, …

Cullet, Celia Alice Easton Koehler

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

“Cullet” is an industry term for the refuse and smashed-up glass added to new material in the process of making new glass. It is related to the word “cull” from the old french “to collect” or gather. This collection of poems picks up the term as a framework for investigating the piece-meal of daily life, tracing relations between the individual and collective, and also tracing vantage and scale; shifts of where and how the speaker directs their gaze. The poems are invested in assembling an ethos of the domestic that recasts “the domestic” to include more public sites of daily …

Mesotopia: Towards A Place Of Lyrical Inquiry, Tristan Verran

School of Art, Design and Architecture Theses

This research project is a comprehensive investigation into the practical applications of a theoretical place of creative intuition I have called ‘the mesotopia’. A mesotopia is a place between conceptual and physical terrains in which inter-object experiential encounters are turned into communicative events. Mesotopian thinking unsettles purely anthropocentric utopian or dystopian future visions, as well as romantic images of Arcadian pasts. I have been attending to the material present of our coastal regions while attempting to intuit, rather than imagine, concealed aspects of these compositional sites. This thesis argues that attending to local environments using a more embodied form of …

A Ramble On Prayer: A Collaboration Between An Artist And A Writer, Alberta Natasia Adji, Harrison Waed See

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

A Ramble on Prayer is a collaborative project that involves multiple stages of interpretation, as creative works are exchanged in response to one another during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This article explores the authors’ experiences of collaboration from the positions of painter, creative writer, and researchers. This collaboration is a reflexive and dialogic space for creative self-narration/expression, allowing Adji’s and See’s imagination and subjectivities to discern, develop, and reciprocate each other’s work. In parallel to these creative reciprocations, also sits a dialogue concerning their collaborative processes to reflexively analyse how the collaborators’ use of visual …