This collection of poems is representative of the creative writing and literary studies completed during my time in Portland State University's Master of Fine Arts Program. Poetry workshops, seminars in prosody, syntax, and translation, and forays into the magic of rhetoric and defamiliarization in the novel have all contributed to the thinking and feeling shown in this work. Some themes that the collection circles around are: the alienating and sometimes ecstatic relationship between the identities of civilized human and human-as-animal, the processes of falling in and out of faith in a greater power and with belonging to a human community, non-binary and unconventional performances of gender and sexuality, psychological inquiry about the nature of the self, the cleaving of mind and body, and meditations on 21st Century youth.