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Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1994.

Bounce House of 1000 Corpses is a collection of poems in which an absurd interior landscape collides with the horrors and mundanities of 21st America, and the absurdity of 21st century America collides with an interior landscape sculpted largely by modern horrors and mundanities. Influences include the New York School, public and private lives, popular culture, the failed nuclear family, the bizarreness and precarity of contemporary work, and the grotesqueries of late capitalism.

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This collection of poems is concerned with loving a place and leaving it. The poems explore the political, generational, and personal struggles and disorientation that emerge from conflicting identities, priorities, values, and ambitions. They wrestle with keeping secrets, transgressing boundaries, demanding distance, occupying liminial spaces, and tolerating mechanical intimacy. They leverage the classical tradition, the (an)aesthetic of mass culture, and the comfort of domestic routine.

When put to the question, "What are your poetics?" I usually answer that I tend toward lyrical and narrative surrealism. Most of the poems in this thesis collection have discernible through-lines, or at least some sense of "aboutness." Across these poems, however, I've experimented with various poetic tools in an attempt to refract experience rather than entirely abstract it. For example, by varying identities and locations of the speaker, some poems achieve a surrealist sense while maintaining proximity to the lyrical or narrative. Some have multiple speakers, and speakers of undefined identity, which further defamiliarizes their language. Another tool I work with is address: to the reader in some poems, between "actors" in other poems, or addresses from speakers to agencies or forces that seem to reside beyond the poem. In this sense, much of this work is performative. Variations in diction, within and across poems, add to both their surreal and performative qualities. Wide variation in form has been another impulse in my work. It has been an exercise in shapeshifting, an often obsessive practice of reworking poems in different structural arrangements, releasing and altering meaning along the way. In many cases, disforming and reforming poems as I revised them felt akin to erasure, a means of abandoning intent. In its eclecticism, I hope this collection reflects how abruptly, how discordantly, language and images are now enabled to encounter us––via what we might consider to be our own devices.

In this collection of work there is a discernible connection to the act of correspondence--both in the sense of a literal examination of the letters of Emily Dickinson to T.W. Higginson, but also in the metaphorical sense of a correspondence between time and place, form and content. Much of this examination is arrived at through erasure, although a good deal of its unfolding is happened upon through an exploration of the sonnet form. Latent in my engagement with both of these forms are questions about the materiality of language as it encounters the subjectivity of memory; they both strive to balance an interior perception of memory that is not anterior to the truth of its experience, or to quote Wallace Stevens, "[to] speak by sight and insight as they are," to the end of locating "the words of the world that are the life of the world."

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