This thesis consists of a collection of poems: two thematic-translations that engage source material for their composition and two anaphoric poems. “A Seeson in Heckk,” an epyllion (or mini-epic), engages Arthur Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell," as it echoes his syntax and translates some of his themes into a portrait of a troubled young speaker familiar but strange to Rimbaud's. “Love Poem,” the first anaphoric poem in the collection, explores the arc of a relationship through surreal, bizarre, and lyrical images that chart the experience of falling in and out of a tumultuous love affair. “THE BOOK OF CLAY” is composed in relation to “The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.” These poems form a surreal, pastiche, thematic-translation of the early American's accounts of her experience during the King Philip's War. “Transplant: Final Lines from a Poem Titled, Cardiology” also uses anaphora, while it explores emotional identity, authenticity, and an overused poetic trope: the heart.

Each poem here wants to be alive. Each in her own slot of earth thinking of the larger plant from which she is a cutting. The larger plant is rooted in time and health. Here are twenty-eight single rhubarbs clicking together. The rhubarbs are a drawer full of handles. Take one up and see about it. You'll notice the foods do not grow with grace. They happen out of curiosity and stubbornness. The foods, they grow up just to grow. Thus, outlying rhubarb in places. Thus, hard clusters requiring patience for the getting through. Rhubarb-thick and crisp and wet-begets rhubarb. If a patch feels like a gang, just knock. Or try around the back and through the yard. Each plant here is in mild to medium danger. Or not. Thus, forth a reporter who takes the shape of you and I. She takes with her a pen! She practices our language but does not lick the dewy, English stalk. Instead, she chews it-a circulating handful of well-fed words. Through osmosis, lunch sinks in. Through osmosis, water. Speedy would be the speech were it elegant, but it is eager. Less in sense but still in awe and admiration and undeniable willfulness. Too, there is the doubt. Here is a record of starts, of nourishment, of heartiness, of growth. It could feed the plants like peels. The foods strange but friendly.

This collection contains poems written between September 2013 and March 2015. In that time, the author has ceased to wear deodorant for apolitical reasons (no fear of cancer from those wonderfully smelling sticks!), has been to foreign countries at least twice, taken looks at carcasses rotting in the streets of the devastatingly wonderful Sonoran Desert, and often pondered why parking garage security guards do not let childish adults linger in their sheltered emptiness. All things necessary for creating horrible poems of boredom, loneliness and reflections on the picking of boogers. It is strange how the accumulation of years in a body's life continually widens the so-called mind's eye, especially for one who is interested in writing things down. A writer walking through the dream of life and inventing its reality. Truly life is an awful experience, but sometimes there are a lot of people out in the sun enjoying a fine spring day and a fly lands on your hand (and you know it's pooping on you) but in that little creature and that little moment there is contained all the love in and for the world which can cause a smile to bring out that one little dimple on a handsome face. Sometimes we like Sunflowers with our torture, and that is just fine. Sometimes we feel more alone being among happy partygoers and sometimes the Red and Green Apples in the grocery store sexually arouse us; these are the moments the poems contained in this collection were birthed from. Ryan Mills: Gone Now, Have Fun!

A collection of poetry that primarily deals with Appalachian voice and environmental issues, navigating queer identities in rural spaces, and violence against the female body. / MFA

This lyrical narrative charts the particularities of a childhood. A mind that is preoccupied with how to negotiate loss; the fear of a family sickness waking up. This piece is arranged with section titles that are designed to give an episodic feel. Each serves as a different method of entering into loss.

Take Me With Your Shovel is a collection of poems that explore systems of oppression with an emphasis on psychiatry and law enforcement, the slow crawl of catching a break as a member of the blue collar class, the monotonous side of working in pop music, drug abuse, and finding God in the midst of it all--salvation through sin rather than salvation from sin.

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My poetry portfolio is 75 pages long, and consists of single poems as well as two series. The first series includes the ‘Good Work’ poems, which explore different ideas of ‘good work’ based on characters’ occupations, preoccupations and mental perspectives. The second series is the ‘Makar’ poems, depicting an imagined world in which the poet is a guardian angel or guiding force. The style of my poetry varies from lyric to prose poetry, with a few language-focused abstract poems, and more formal styles, like a villanelle. Dreaming and waking are two themes that reflect aspects of reality and perception. Much of my portfolio is rooted in reflections of identity: Identity in terms of work, and the story we tell to the world about what we do; identity in terms of inter-personal relationships and how those connections form who we become; identity in terms of memory, and the story of who we have been; and identity in terms of the stories we tell ourselves about who we think we are. And if none of those stories align, what kind of fragmented self-identity does that reveal? The narrative poems often use different characters and personas in order to enact these lenses of identity. Even with only a few epistles in the collection, my poetry has been influenced by the epistolary ideas of separation and reunion (as critic Altman describes them: ‘bridge’ and ‘distance’). Similarly, the prose poems often riff on the unification and distancing of various themes, in a mediation of together- and apart-ness. I have used letters and diary-entries as addresses to the audience, and also as invitations for the reader to access the poem through different points of entry. My academic thesis focuses on the utilisation of epistles in contemporary American prose poetry. It is 26,000 words, and is divided into three sections: focused on Epistles: Poems by Mark Jarman; Letters to Kelly Clarkson by Julia Bloch, and The Desires of Letters by Linda Brown; and Dear Editor: Poems by Amy Newman. Why are we still writing poems as letters when we don’t habitually write letters for personal correspondence anymore? The poem-as-letter, or epistle, offers the ability to craft complex relationships within the reader/author, writer/recipient, and open/closed dynamics of intimacy in literature. The criticism is framed within the methodology of reader-response theory, and draws upon examples of epistles in history and literature to connect and establish themes.