A collection of poems engaging themes of: the concept of choice in queerness; heteronormative familial socialization; the metaphorical and literal loss of motherhood from a transmasculine subjectivity; how people socialized into cis-normative feminity learn methods of self-protection that are dependent upon womens’ collectivity; and how media representations shape a child’s perspective of identity-building options. In queerness, our lack of choice operates as a source of empowerment—or, rather, a shield against doubts. To insist on having no choice is to ask the hegemon for a form of parental protection. Innocent. I was born this way. You birthed me this way. The least you can do is love the monster you made. These poems reject this parental protection. Born this way. Transexuals are expected to perform a linear narrative in order to substantiate their claim. I knew I was a boy from a young age. I want to have heterosexual sex with women. Now, I am a man. However, this demand for a linear narrative has scarcely gone uncontested. Lou Sullivan, cited in the epigraph, famously rebelled against his rejection from the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program, a rejection rooted in the belief that transsexuals cannot also be homosexuals. “I love being a girl,” he writes in his childhood diaries. “So delicate.” These poems ask: If a transmasculine person can be a homosexual, then can a transmasculine person love being a girl?

Light Suite is a collection of the work I produced during my enrollment in the University of New Orleans Low Residency M.F.A. program. The writing, format and length styles reflect my experimentation with my craft. It also provides insight as to what my "poetic voice" is. Light Suite attempts to entwine personal experience with engaged observation and occasional flights of fantasy. The following poems illustrate my attempt at diversifying personal, poetic style. There are travel, prose, and accidental meaning poems. There are poems that feature personal narrative and collaboration. All of my works do share one characteristic and that is the close relationship with visual representation of an oral experience. I employ white space, line breaks, line length, assonance and consonance to create works that are as close to my speaking voice as possible.

"Fame" is a series of poems in four parts: A., B., C., and &. The first section explores both the concept of autobiography and adoption. The second section concerns itself with biographical poetry as it explores Boar Girl. The third section aims to rethink the confessional poem, and the final section is a playful engagement with music and literature.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-87).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2008. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 140-145). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nebraska, 1920. / Without thesis note. Includes bibliographical references.

Perfect Teeth is a collection of poems.

This thesis consists of a collection of poems: two thematic-translations that engage source material for their composition and two anaphoric poems. “A Seeson in Heckk,” an epyllion (or mini-epic), engages Arthur Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell," as it echoes his syntax and translates some of his themes into a portrait of a troubled young speaker familiar but strange to Rimbaud's. “Love Poem,” the first anaphoric poem in the collection, explores the arc of a relationship through surreal, bizarre, and lyrical images that chart the experience of falling in and out of a tumultuous love affair. “THE BOOK OF CLAY” is composed in relation to “The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.” These poems form a surreal, pastiche, thematic-translation of the early American's accounts of her experience during the King Philip's War. “Transplant: Final Lines from a Poem Titled, Cardiology” also uses anaphora, while it explores emotional identity, authenticity, and an overused poetic trope: the heart.

Each poem here wants to be alive. Each in her own slot of earth thinking of the larger plant from which she is a cutting. The larger plant is rooted in time and health. Here are twenty-eight single rhubarbs clicking together. The rhubarbs are a drawer full of handles. Take one up and see about it. You'll notice the foods do not grow with grace. They happen out of curiosity and stubbornness. The foods, they grow up just to grow. Thus, outlying rhubarb in places. Thus, hard clusters requiring patience for the getting through. Rhubarb-thick and crisp and wet-begets rhubarb. If a patch feels like a gang, just knock. Or try around the back and through the yard. Each plant here is in mild to medium danger. Or not. Thus, forth a reporter who takes the shape of you and I. She takes with her a pen! She practices our language but does not lick the dewy, English stalk. Instead, she chews it-a circulating handful of well-fed words. Through osmosis, lunch sinks in. Through osmosis, water. Speedy would be the speech were it elegant, but it is eager. Less in sense but still in awe and admiration and undeniable willfulness. Too, there is the doubt. Here is a record of starts, of nourishment, of heartiness, of growth. It could feed the plants like peels. The foods strange but friendly.

This collection contains poems written between September 2013 and March 2015. In that time, the author has ceased to wear deodorant for apolitical reasons (no fear of cancer from those wonderfully smelling sticks!), has been to foreign countries at least twice, taken looks at carcasses rotting in the streets of the devastatingly wonderful Sonoran Desert, and often pondered why parking garage security guards do not let childish adults linger in their sheltered emptiness. All things necessary for creating horrible poems of boredom, loneliness and reflections on the picking of boogers. It is strange how the accumulation of years in a body's life continually widens the so-called mind's eye, especially for one who is interested in writing things down. A writer walking through the dream of life and inventing its reality. Truly life is an awful experience, but sometimes there are a lot of people out in the sun enjoying a fine spring day and a fly lands on your hand (and you know it's pooping on you) but in that little creature and that little moment there is contained all the love in and for the world which can cause a smile to bring out that one little dimple on a handsome face. Sometimes we like Sunflowers with our torture, and that is just fine. Sometimes we feel more alone being among happy partygoers and sometimes the Red and Green Apples in the grocery store sexually arouse us; these are the moments the poems contained in this collection were birthed from. Ryan Mills: Gone Now, Have Fun!