Poetry Commons^™

The Car Ride Home, Jonathan Rivera

English Honors Theses

The Car Ride Home explores the coming of age of a young boy into a queer man, searching and sifting through the trauma of home life, and realizing his mother’s addiction affects more than just herself, but an entire family. This realization coincides with views of masculinity, as he carefully watches the men around him. He internalizes these depictions of masculinity when exploring his own confusion and investigation of his own sexual identity and queerness. The poetry collection is broken up into two connected parts. Part one explores the illusion of childhood and nostalgia while introducing subtle glimpses and secrets …

Food Transitions: How Food Symbolizes Another Chapter, Josiah Peralta

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Through critical self-analysis of my life, I intend to answer the question, “How does food help us transition from one chapter of our life to another?” My purpose is to provide a personal viewpoint about related topics associated with food, like class, origin of food, religion or lack of, culture and tradition, obesity, food choice, and love. Through this viewpoint, I will demonstrate how food associations can encapsulate our past, memories, and identity in a way that moves us from the past to the present, and, hopefully, the future.

Capstone theme: Food, Ethics, and Politics

Frida's Daughter, Myrta Vida

Theses

The purpose of my creative writing is to highlight a group of U.S. citizens still woefully underrepresented in literature proper: the Latinx middle class. I’m keenly interested in exploring Puerto Rican and first- and second-generation Latinx immigrant stories. Even though some of the experiences from these groups have been elegantly visited by writers such as Giannina Braschi, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Julia Alvarez, and others, there are nuances to the Latinx middle class experience that are yet to be uncovered. Being stuck in the cultural, linguistic, socio-economic, and political middles in a country that has recently taken a largely nationalist …

The Bronx Cocked Back And Smoking Multifarious Prose Performance, Alex Avila

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Bronx Cocked Back And Smoking is a collection of multifarious prose performances recounting the historical, personal, social, political and cultural constructs of a city birthed by violence. This body of work is accompanied by video, audio, photography, and theatre performance texts. St. Mary’s Housing project, in the Bronx, is the foundation where most of this literary work takes place. The modern day Griot (storyteller) is a Poet, guiding his audience through the social inequalities and disparities that plague St. Mary’s community. The Poet shares personal traumatic insights while simultaneously utilizing writing as a form of survival to the conditions …

Latin-America, Mauricio E. Novoa

Student Publications

A poem describing the Prince George's County and Montgomery County Latin American communities in Maryland.