b o y is an extended lyric poem/essay that uses repetition, fragment, and syntax to continually build a form that continually falls apart. The poem is both a meditation and an investigation into loss, and into the relationship of loss to identity, with making a poem, and with holding on to something. What does mourning look like and how does it change as it accrues? How is mourning inherited? This work does not claim release; it reenvisions or argues against narratives that insist that the end of great loss is to "let go," "set free" or "rest."

The poems that comprise Murmuration are an act of vigilance in the face of loss. At certain moments in the distorted timeline of grief one searches the remaining world around them for signs of the beloved, signs that they are not simply gone but instead transformed or dispersed into another way of being. In this looking one's relationship to the external world undergoes a radical transformation of its own and demands a sustained attention from the bereaved that often draws from, but ultimately outruns cataloguing acts of memory. These poems attempt to render the movements of that attention as it learns to track a body made formless. These are moments of a consciousness dispersed in language as it follows the undulations, ambiguities, absences, presences, and transformations of form after death. Here, the speaker of these poems listens and watches for the languages of the transformed in whatever form they take; an attempt to listen to the murmur and eventually to learn to murmur back.

This collection represents work produced between September 2015 and April 2017. A phantom limb is characterized not by what is absent but by the wound that created its loss--the haunting of a pain, and the confusion caused by its non-presence. These poems shift and shutter around their phantom limbs, tracking the wounds split open by grief, the physicality of time’s passing, and the mind’s inability to reconcile its own impermanence. The poems hope to resist the lyric while simultaneously imploding form, confronting the mind’s relationship with the natural and digital worlds it inhabits and is informed by. Celestial bodies and human bodies share a panic of impermanence here––time is as unknowable but also as physical as star stuff. In their disfluencies and insistences grappling toward some kind of "feeling," these poems investigate what it means to live and survive a life characterized by loss in its various shapes and forms.

"The Grief You Can Swallow and the Rage You Can't" investigates the evolution of elegiac form through a collection of interconnected poems exploring contemporary loss. The manuscript develops new poetic architectures for expressing grief, employing multiple formal strategies including clinical studies, psalms, concrete poetry, and variant realities. Through the lens of personal loss the collection examines how traditional elegiac containers strain to hold modern experiences of mourning. The work engages with established forms like the ghazal and tanka while simultaneously developing experimental structures that challenge conventional approaches to grief poetry. Central to the manuscript is the metaphor of mutation, both in its exploration of cancer and in its formal innovations. The collection's structure moves from a communal invitation to a private dreamscape, ultimately ending without punctuation to suggest grief's resistance to closure. By integrating clinical language with raw emotion, developing rage as a distinct poetic dialect, and creating hybrid forms that bridge presence and absence, the manuscript proposes new possibilities for elegiac expression in the contemporary era. / Master of Fine Arts / "The Grief You Can Swallow and the Rage You Can't" explores how we process the loss of loved ones in today's digital age. This collection of poems follows a son's journey through grief after his mother's death, using various poetic forms to capture different aspects of mourning - from clinical hospital reports to dream sequences. The poems explore how grief changes shape over time, much like cancer cells mutate, and how rage becomes its own form of remembrance. Moving between childhood memories in convenience stores, imagined alternate realities, and surreal dreams where the mother still lives, the collection suggests that modern grief refuses simple resolution. Instead of trying to "move on," these poems propose that loss becomes part of our DNA, constantly evolving but never truly ending. Through both traditional poetry forms and experimental approaches, the manuscript examines how we carry grief in an age where our loved ones leave behind both physical and digital echoes.