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Thespian Do not intrude, Even though the door---unlocked--- For the smile I wear today Will be tomorrow In the rain… The smiling mask, The private pain…

Collection of poems.

No description available.

No description available.

The work is a collection of poems entitled The Sometime Joy, comprising a mix of poems completed before and during my studies at UNT. The manuscript is my second completed full-length work after my first manuscript, the unpublished Night, Translated. The Sometime Joy shares many of the same themes with its predecessor, although stylistically the more recent work hews much more strongly toward the infusion of speculative and fantastical elements (just one example being the apocalyptic poem "Petal Storm"). The speculative components of the collection allow me to express and utilize the full range of my imagination, to use poetry to explore alternate existences and to create allegories, such as the "Market" series of poems, where capitalism is embodied as a chimerical beast that would fit in a horror film. The collection functions as my exploration of the intersections between folklore and pop culture, a series of meditations on the strangeness of human perspectives and how the relation between perceiver and the perceived alloys and transforms both. The collection also delves into horrific subjects varying from serried monsters (wendigos, the capitalist system, J. Edgar Hoover), the apocalypse, and the capacity of mundane humans to be cruel to each other, but also affirms the same imagination's potential to delight and sooth or poke fun. One of the central themes is embodiment and the human body and its components, seen through the "organ" sequence of poems that explore various human organs, as well as poems like the Market poems or "Hereby, Dragons" where concepts or abstractions are incarnated and embodied. Overall, the collection functions as an example of a contemporary poetry collection with an eclectic stylistic range and multiple linked sequences within the different sections.

This is a collection of poems surrounding issues of eco-conservation and depression.

A collection of poems.

The project approaches a medical case report I authored as a US Army Special Forces Medic titled "Prolonged Field Care of a Casualty With Penetrating Chest Trauma." Despite my authorship, the report is one of DeLillo's "millions of components stamped out, repeated endlessly." Millions of these types of reports exist, and while the specific details vary, the report's voice remains uniform. The voice is mine and not mine. It is the voice of the Army, the state, and the hospital speaking through me. In its objectivity, it reflects the emotionally compartmentalized mindset soldiers train to adopt in order to function effectively under extreme stress. The report describes a combat patrol in Afghanistan during which an Afghan soldier was wounded with a gunshot wound to the chest. I provided medical care in the field for roughly thirteen hours until transfer to a coalition hospital where he underwent surgery and made a full recovery. In the report, I describe one of the most intense experiences of my life in precise, objective, medical detail. It was the first time I had been shot at, the first time I treated a casualty under fire. It is an accurate but partial depiction of myself experiencing and managing trauma. Now, years later, I work to unrepeat this document through a series of poetic erasures and individual poems that respond to, adapt, and transform the language of the report.

A collection of poems and critical introduction.