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The following manuscript is a collection of poems composed largely as direct address to an idealized reader, "the Beloved Other." The poems enact and describe the vagaries of relationship, familial and romantic as well as mystical and intrapersonal.

No description available.

This is a book of poems exploring notions of isolation, society, and the interpersonal. The work investigates man's relationship to the world through the lens of both the quotidian and the obscure. With subjects ranging from Typhoid Mary to St. Herman of Alaska, the poems consider through rhyme, form, rhythm and sound, a small portion of the experience of loss, isolation, and discovery to which we are all eternally bound.

This thesis is a collection of poems which were written between 2011 and 2017. Much of my earliest work is in this collection, though, most all of it has been heavily revised over the years. The content of this collection begins with seven poems that address the death of my best friend and brother, Jon. These were some of the most difficult poems for me to write but ultimately, I found that the process, though intense, was cathartic. The rest of the collection addresses themes regarding class, place, substance abuse, mental health; including but not limited to: suicidal ideation, depression, family, social structure, politics, and anger. A great deal of the content is dark and melancholic in mood and moves through very deep depression at points. A few relationships I've had are addressed and wrestled with and emerge as two separate apologies of sorts. I also wrestle with the idea of home and living on the west coast. The final poem, "Choose Life" was inspired by the film Trainspotting and I felt it served the collection to have a poem that is loosely comparable to a reprise that ends the thesis with a more positive outlook on life.

The poems contained in this collection attempt to enact the dizzying experience of being a thing of consciousness in the world, the strangeness of navigating life as a body among bodies. In doing so, they stumble over, into and through themes of relation, grief, solitude, ritual, identity, perception, failure, idolatry and survival, among other things.

This collection of poems explores memory, trauma, personal relationships, and the natural world. It is a study of the themes that arise from experience and the patterns of language that living creates within an individual. Particular attention to sound, syntax (conveying physical experience and recall), and pacing (representative of natural and biological rhythms) are central to this collection.

This collection is representative of the studies I have completed during my time in the MFA program. Poetry workshops and seminars on prosody, translation, fragmentation, and constraint-based writing have contributed to the creation of this project. Thematically, my work is largely concerned with identity, the relationship between the external world and internal experiences, and perception. It attempts to capture something of the epiphanic, those rare moments when the ordinary becomes ineffable.