The Cicada is a book of poetry.

I Am a Lonely Engineer is a collection of poems dealing with the emotional fallout of a speaker whose life has been uprooted by the absence of his father. Through a series of semi-surreal narratives, the speaker eventually comes to terms with his father's absence and begins the process of healing in the wake of this familial trauma. / Master of Fine Arts

I Woke Up a Ghost is a collection of poems interacting and reacting to the death of a mother in the speaker's childhood. Through examining various relationships and states of mind, the speaker seeks new ways to imaginatively interpret and emotionally deal with loss and begin healing. / Master of Fine Arts

Sins of the Daughter is a poetic exploration of one woman's journey through a gendered world. Broken into four distinct sections ("Circling the Slaughterhouse," "Circumference," "Sins of the Daughter," and "Magnetic Resonance"), the collection uses formal verse and free verse to explore the domestic, spiritual, physical, and cultural facets of femaleness, feminism, and femininity. / Master of Fine Arts

Shark Heart is a manuscript of poems that maneuver between fearlessness and tenderness at the drop of a dime. In the same way that many sharks need to survive by constantly swimming in order to extract oxygen from the water streaming between their gills, the heart muscle needs to constantly pump blood throughout a body to sustain life: there is no rest for either fish or organ until death. These poems, too, keep pushing forward; they are not afraid to explore the small beats of childhood and hidden desire, or the larger mysteries of illness and death. / Master of Fine Arts

Moon-Thing is a collection of playful confessional poems. The poems address ways in which language shapes and mitigates our reality, allowing us both a way into our emotions and a way out of them. / Master of Fine Arts

In these lyric-narrative poems, the speaker is under constant threat of violence, trouble, danger, or death, but that death is never realized. Rather, the speaker, much like many of the lives in the desert, not only survives amidst the constant threat of violence, but flourishes because of it; the interior landscape of the speaker, the tenor of the language and syntax, and exterior landscapes implied in these poems are mirror surfaces, and as such, so are we. Despite the exterior world and relationships being arguably broken down, failed, impoverished, abandoned, etc., these poems gesture toward a sense of redemption, hope, reverence for life, and a kind of holiness that are found in the church of the desert. It has been said that the desert is monotheistic; if this is the case, then the speaker and the lives in these poems, despite being hardened by the desert, sing hymnals that celebrate that faith. There is a church in the wild. / Master of Fine Arts

Greedy Hunger and Happy Ruin is a collection of poems that gathers a life of fragments and frayed ends into a loose narrative of desire, loss, language, and almost redemption. The poems examine the costs of leaving home, as seen in a mermaid's wish to become human, an immigrant family's aspirations of upward mobility, and an immigrant daughter's hunger for U.S. American social/lingual fluency, male attention, and erasure of her difference. The collection follows speakers who, hungry for homes they cannot return to, navigate a landscape crowded with fairy tales, biblical myth, filial duty, and pop culture in search of the perfect lover or dress to transform them from brokenness to wholeness. As they strive for such unattainable ideals, however, these speakers inevitably end up homeless and/or scarred, as exemplified by Joyce Wildenstein's plastic surgery excesses. The speakers in these poems rue their missed chances, lost loves, ageing bodies, and crowded histories of wrong men. They offer their sins in confession but are unsure whether such disclosure can free them from the mistakes that haunt them. Ultimately, Greedy Hunger and Happy Ruin begins to question what we choose to covet and how we choose to reflect on our pasts. The poems' speakers must confront the fantasies and ambitions that govern their lives and discover that transformation and absolution come not from a radiant external source but internal shifts of perspective, moment by moment, memory by memory, towards an embrace of the loss and longing (and joy) that make us human. / Master of Fine Arts

The Beaten Pathos is a manuscript of poems written by a shelter dog--a shelter dog whose distrust of both his reader-dogs and himself amplifies his need to communicate. More often than not, the result is a poem borne of an imagination both ostentatiously loud and cutting at an oblique angle, like a miter saw. Additionally, a handful of poems are muted and cool (like Miles Davis' trumpet), and, consequently, more direct in their expression of the poet's emotional vulnerability. Whether the poems in this manuscript are of the miter-saw or trumpet variety, their speakers--although frequently not equipped to do so--are earnest about getting and/or making even the most sideways of things right. / Master of Fine Arts

An autobiographical collection of poems that primarily explores through hunting and fishing imagery my estranged relationship with my father and his untimely death, probes my experience of anticipating marriage and being married, and reflects on my pregnancy with my daughter. The collection is also concerned with issues of identity, naming, and spirituality (specifically, prayer, angels, and how language and belief interact). These concepts are often in conversation with the death of my father, marriage, and pregnancy. / Master of Fine Arts