Loose Ends is a collection of lyric and narrative poems that explores the multiple terrains of identity—individual, cultural, and historical. The poems embrace the essential incoherence of the self, resisting monolithic identity in favor of a multi-faceted, historically complex, imagistic rendering of the inner life. At its heart, the collection seeks to grapple with the gravitas of living: the continual assault of history and nature on human agency, the staggering context of the universe as a backdrop for communal and individual struggle. While single poems may only touch briefly or incompletely on these themes, the collection as a whole presents an admittedly inchoate picture of contemporary American identity.

This collection is an attempt to understand being a woman by exploring the before, during, after of becoming a mother. Loss, sex, identity, failure, gratitude and family are common threads.

This collection represents work produced between September of 2014 and April of 2016. These are poems about structure. Or about difference. Or about love. Or they are an attempt to decipher what it can feel like in 2016, in the lonelinesses and in the solidarities that emerge in the apparent collapse of utopian possibility, in the efforts at its reconstruction, and in the search for the next rupture.

I wrote The Names between the summer of 2015 and the spring of 2016. Also, I wrote it between the summer of 2006 and the spring of 2014 (a lot of The Names was taken from my journals [many of the names were taken from my journals (I am speaking of erasure)]). Thus, things happen with time. A train from the office. The rind of an orange, flitting out. I sit down. I am going, I say, to get likes, my bio filled out nicely. Like: What are you doing with your life? And me like: The rind! The rind! The rind! The rind! its meaning fading slowly through the back of the train. In the poem, I am a solitary and joking figure, tender for objects, working in spaces. I look out to the names.

In content, concept, and form, my collection of poems is composed of a number of thematic obsessions. These are: music, sound, and hearing; recording and surveillance; play and participation as described by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth & Method; the angel of history as described by Walter Benjamin; situation, inheritance, influence; aggression, antagonism, manipulation, control; fixity and mutability; eros, desire, and sex; conversation, the dialectic relationship of wholes and parts. You might see that all of these themes relate, that they each appear as one another. WAX speaks and performs all of these themes from that point where self and other--and where identity and universality--collapse; that single point of fear, violence, loss, union, obliteration, feeling, responsibility; that single point of possibility where we might discover a revised I, a new answer for "how to write we."

This poetry collection engages with the mutable nature of memory and its instantiations: memory as artifact, memory as place, memory as story, memory as compulsion. Influenced by the lyric meditations of Robert Hass and Li-Young Lee, the intellectual clarity of Elizabeth Bishop, the place-oriented imagism of Bashō and Gary Snyder, and the reflexive, self-conscious impulse of Sharon Olds, the poems tackle a vast geography of recollection—from Kyoto to the Okefenokee to the turnings and obsessions of the author’s mind itself. Using a sequence of date-stamped prose poems as narrative fence posts, the collection addresses multiple modalities in memory by weaving together longer meditative lyrics, shorter narrative and place-based poems, and deconstructed lyrics that employ slashes as syntactical place markers. In testing memory’s capacity for multiple truths, and in discovering its inherent limitations, this collection grapples with the simultaneity of memory as an act of self-preservation, self-creation, and relentless re-creation.

Although I've read and written poetry for my own pleasure for about twenty years now, I've only seriously studied and written poetry on a consistent basis for the past two years. In this sense, I still consider myself a beginning poet. When attempting to pursue an art form as refined and historically informed as poetry, only after spending a number of years reading and writing intensively would I no longer consider myself a beginner, but a practitioner of the art. I've grounded my early development as a poet in concision, voice, and imagination, and hope to build upon these ideas with other poetic techniques, theories, and forms as I go forward. I am particularly interested in mastering the sonnet form, a concise and imaginative form that will allow me to further develop my skills. Hopefully, the works in this thesis reflect that effort.

"It is with one of the publishing awards available to young poets that this study is concerned, namely, the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which has been offered since 1919 by the Yale University Press. Because this award was initiated to furnish a medium of publication for a first volume by a young poet as a stimulus to further writing, this writer was interested in determining whether this award proved to be an incentive to further writing by the individuals of the group. This study, therefore, is an attempt to determine if the first forty poets represented in the Series continued writing after their first publication, and if so, in what media, and if further literary recognition was awarded to any of the group"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1953." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Agnes Gregory, Professor Directing Study. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-105).

A collection of poems.

A long poem.