Poetry Commons^™

Collateral: Poems, Joshua Jon Robbins

Doctoral Dissertations

In the lyric tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets and James Wright’s odes to the Midwest, the poems in Collateral interrogate the complexities of faith and doubt in middle-class America and present a witness compelled to translate suburbia’s landscapes and evangelical banalities into a testimony of hard truths. These poems explore the emotional exhaustion that accompanies language’s broken connection to ideal meaning and how both are unable to fully correspond to our lives. The manuscript is also an exploration of my own corresponding lyric struggle to reconcile what is and what should be, the personal and the political …

About A Yellow Ball, Shannon Alice Salter

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

These are poems made from many things: color, eggs, oranges, many kinds of seeds, leaves, wind, California, the desert, birds. They are things alive in the world and alive in my heart. I cannot take them out of the world, but from my heart I can have whatever appears on its surface. The language of steam.

They are poems that like to be at home.

California is my home and so is the Mojave (and so is every desert). I live in a valley about four hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, in the city of Las Vegas. What better …