The preface to this collection of poems, "Memory and The Myth of Lost Truth," explores the physical and metaphysical roles memory plays within poetry. It examines the melancholy frequently birthed from a particular kind poetic self-inquiry, or, more specifically, the feelings associated with recognizing the self's inability to re-inhabit the emotional experience of past events, and how poetry can redeem, via engaging our symbolic intuition, the faultiness of remembered history. Dawn in the Empty House is a collection of poems about the implications of human relationships, self-deception, and memory as a tool for self-discovery.

The poems in this collection are in search of. They are digging through the debris of memory, of memory blurred by trauma or degraded by time or worn thin from retrieval, from repeated examination—an ongoing attempt to apprehend. They are poems of internalized violence, addiction, domestic upheaval, sexual abuse, assault, abandonment, separation. They are also poems of adoption, of the overlap between stories, of roots and more roots, of tangled histories, of the point of rupture being the point of origination. As such, they are unsure of how to proceed, how to present themselves: they are self-conscious poems, anxious to communicate yet at times unable to break free of their own spiraling repetitions: the ritualized performance of pain as both an attempt to speak back to suffering as well as unintended proliferation of such. Compulsion. Depression. Suicidal ideation. Of course what we are talking about is the longevity of grief, its many mutations. How we learn to recognize it for what it is. What we can do with it.

This creative thesis consists of a collection of original poetry. The poems, written in the style of the confessional, follow one speaker through the trials and joys of family, neighborhood community, work, and self. Though the poems do not follow a narrative or chronological path, they are organized by theme and subject matter. The cohesive thread that runs through the collection is the exploration of the question of both personal and societal responsibility. The speaker in the poems constantly challenges the expectations and conventions of responsibility by looking back on the events and situations that brought her to where she is in the present of the collection. / Department of English

A collection of poems around themes of motherhood, chronic illness, memory, and internal and external landscapes coalescing.

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.