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.

This thesis is concerned with the establishment of an underlying philosophy for Robert Browning's many themes. It asserts that a notion found in II Corinthians 3:6, "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life," is basic to ideas such as Browning's belief in the superiority of life over art, of the wisdom of the heart over the intellect, and of honest skepticism over unexamined belief. The sources used to establish this premise are mainly the poems themselves, grouped in categories by subject matter of art, love, and religion. Some of his correspondence is also examined to ascertain how relevant the philosophy was to his own life. The conclusion is that the concept is, indeed, pervasive throughout Browning's poetry and extremely important to the man himself.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Cities Beyond is a collection of poems about the liminal space between the suburbs and the pasture as metaphor for the created space of memory, self, and location.

Many contemporary writers maintain that a prime requisite of poetry is autobiographical sincerity. They would have the poet commit himself to an openness with his audience that is usually reserved for only the most intimate relationships. The thirty-two poems of this thesis were written as a reaction to current confessional trends and postulate that the creation of fictions to live by is an intrinsic part of the human process. Central to the work is the idea that past fictions, traditions, and myths are no longer functional, and no workable fictions have yet been created. The overriding image of the work is that of a dance in a mirrored room where illusion and reflection are difficult to separate from reality and where the dancers move without knowledge of the meaning of their movement.

This collection of poems explores themes of time and space, energy, entropy and decay, and the frames we use to resist the inevitable trend toward disorder that defines a human experience of the observable universe.

Poems.