Matching Items (11)
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- All Subjects: Writing
- Creators: Ball, Sally
Description
Chris Miller's Souvenirs of Sleep is as serious as it is whimsical, if this is a possibility. The "Museum of the Zoo-real" may be an equally appropriate title as animals are often in performance. In this visual and spiritual investigation, childhood, dream, and the loss of a mother to suicide are the currents. Miller's work is informed by the cinema of Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson and beyond. Miller believes in the power of implication. The poems begin with intense focus, but are often in the business of expansion. Souvenirs of Sleep is a journey toward sense-making, a search for language that might allow it.
ContributorsMiller, Christopher (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
DescriptionA short collection of poems.
ContributorsLee, Mary Hayoung (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Liston, Chelsea (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description"Heirloom" is a short collection of fourteen poems.
ContributorsLaLone, Skyler Elizabeth (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Insect Girls is a chapbook-length collection of poems exploring the human inclination toward, and desire for, violence. Using insects and other bugs as motifs to show how people can often be treated like insects, these 25 poems complicate the relationships between violent people and their victims. The collection specifically focuses on women's issues such as domestic violence and female sexuality. The speakers range from a prostitute waiting in the rain, to a submissive girl at a fetish party, to a housewife with a werewolf for a husband. Violence and sex are depicted as inherently intertwined. Because of this, many characters in the book show a connection between desire and violence, how cruelty can have a kind of sex appeal. This is explored in the collection with depictions of sadomasochism and BDSM, where power dynamics can be at certain times problematic, and at others, beautiful. In writing these poems, I was inspired by the fact that upon seeing a harmless bug, so many people's first instinct is to crush it, for no reason at all except because they can. Bug imagery appears throughout the collection, illustrating the dehumanizing aspect of cruelty. The capture of a butterfly serves as a metaphor for sexual assault, and elsewhere bee wings show a desire for escape. Imagery as a whole is important to the collection because it illustrates not only the physical scars that result from violent actions, but also the strength and loveliness within the survivors. In Insect Girls, I didn't want to hide away ugliness, but I didn't want to hide away beauty either.
ContributorsPrice, Emily Kay (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Giner, Oscar (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
In The Queen of Technicolor, poems draw from the lives of Mexican-Americans as immigrants and their experience of otherness. Facets of a more complex identity—assimilation, language, and a shared human experience—are woven to suggest the need for recognition. The poems are set in the Southwestern United States borderlands as well as Mexico during present day but with a layer of narrative reaching back to the 1940’s and the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
ContributorsBalderrama, Jacqueline (Author) / Rios, Alberto (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Rural Thrill is a broken fruit, an electric fence, and, at the end, the absence of body. It comes in three sections, with the first laying the foundation for the world in which the collection takes place—a small southern town, where there is obvious economic disparity and the supernatural is easily expected, believed, and in some cases, assumed. The second section focuses more closely on the main speaker of the collection who is growing into her own sexual desires against the backdrop of a murder which has swept through her town, complicating the speaker’s relationship to her body and the way she communicates desire. In the final section of the book, the poems come even closer as they explore the internal landscape of the speaker’s body and the many versions of the speaker that inhabit that place. The internal happenings of the third section of the book, reflect back on the external world mapped out in both the first and second sections. At the end, the energy of the body is all that remains with all boundaries of physicality erased, an example of how the body and mind negotiate safety in the face of risk and desire.
ContributorsAlbin, Lauren (Author) / Rios, Alberto (Thesis advisor) / Goldberg, Beckian F (Committee member) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Truce Country describes the uneasy states of uncertainty. The speaker exists in displacement, such as the speaker’s ambivalent relationship to America, love of its ideals and individuals as well as constant self-awareness of race, and the role of English as both a first and second language. The poems work on their own logic and take a deadpan tone towards sexuality and the surreal. Through autobiography and persona, they question the validity of memories, and the study of perfection casts utopia as dystopia.
ContributorsBae, Sue Hyon (Author) / Ball, Sara (Thesis advisor) / Dubie, Normal (Committee member) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
DescriptionPoems
ContributorsCinquepalmi, Anthony (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
Erosion: A Collection of Poems consists of ten prose poems that explore the processing of trauma through a single lens. We follow the work’s main character as she navigates recovery following a medical trauma in Peru from which she ought to have died. The pieces challenge the readers to immerse themselves within her narrative to understand the isolation that trauma ushers in, as she struggles to know her own newfound aloneness.
While the poems illustrate the complexity of one’s experience with both PTSD and its stages of recovery (e.g., emergency, numbness, intrusive/repetitive, integration), they are anchored in the sensory, the concrete. Amidst the terror of the symptoms at the most basic, raw level, she attempts to reclaim selfhood, which involves wrestling with philosophical suicide, reconciling realities, numbness and the widening of a barrier, stunning intimacies, the craving to feel, and both the desire and the need to connect authentically without being able to satiate such inclinations.
Influenced by the works of Frank Bidart, Claudia Rankine, James Longenbach, and Carolyn Forché, the pieces rely heavily upon rhythm and spacing, imagery, and associative linkages throughout the work to craft a sense of physical, intellectual, and emotional movement within the space.
The collection focuses upon the narrative of one survivor of trauma, and though traumas may be experienced differently, and while PTSD may manifest itself in profoundly diverse ways, the pieces aim to capture the shared foundation of the experience — the isolation and the pure, unadulterated pain — in order to cast a universal veil onto the exploration, providing the audience with insight into one of trauma’s most important facets.
While the poems illustrate the complexity of one’s experience with both PTSD and its stages of recovery (e.g., emergency, numbness, intrusive/repetitive, integration), they are anchored in the sensory, the concrete. Amidst the terror of the symptoms at the most basic, raw level, she attempts to reclaim selfhood, which involves wrestling with philosophical suicide, reconciling realities, numbness and the widening of a barrier, stunning intimacies, the craving to feel, and both the desire and the need to connect authentically without being able to satiate such inclinations.
Influenced by the works of Frank Bidart, Claudia Rankine, James Longenbach, and Carolyn Forché, the pieces rely heavily upon rhythm and spacing, imagery, and associative linkages throughout the work to craft a sense of physical, intellectual, and emotional movement within the space.
The collection focuses upon the narrative of one survivor of trauma, and though traumas may be experienced differently, and while PTSD may manifest itself in profoundly diverse ways, the pieces aim to capture the shared foundation of the experience — the isolation and the pure, unadulterated pain — in order to cast a universal veil onto the exploration, providing the audience with insight into one of trauma’s most important facets.
ContributorsBacon, Lauren Whitney (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Irish, Jennifer (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This Cannot Be Forest Bathing is a collection of poems that deals with how we see ourselves in the greater picture. Reflecting on one’s experiences and trying to project the future is challenging for a young person, and these poems are my way of accepting that life, and the future, are both ever-changing. The practice of “forest bathing,” known as shinrin-yoku in Japan, means to ‘take in the forest.’ This form of meditation and self-cleansing is associated with a form of therapy. Shinrin-yoku utilizes techniques or treatments that focus on bettering physical and mental health through nature. During a “forest bath,” the participant is able to relax through being outside; in calmness, one is able to think clearly. For my collection, I wanted to emphasize this self-reflection as a dark meditation instead of a stereotypically peaceful endeavor. The title is a manifestation of disbelief, as I realized ‘I am with nature, in a moment of rest, and should be enjoying myself, but I am lost and feel trapped instead of being found. I still think about who I am as an individual, my anxieties, and of the future.’ As I am usually inspired by nature, all of my works were written either in connection to, or physically within the outside world. I find closure and relief through writing, and I hope that my poetry connects people together in our dark moments, reminding the reader that they are not alone. In youth, we are lost but never alone, even in the most tumultuous of times.
ContributorsNino, Alexa Sophia (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Erin, Noehre (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-12