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…

The Fledglings of Anani is a universe with an underlying organizing principle of desire, auspiciousness and serendipity, the veiled doors and windows of these realms serve as fugues bridging layers of time leading us through myth and landscape intimately tied to the physical intelligence of earth and character of place.…

This creative thesis is a work of narrative and lyric poetry. Death and Nature are two complex themes that emerge frequently in the poems and work as well across the breadth of the manuscript. The speakers' perspectives vary and are indebted to two sub-genres of poetry, namely--The Poetry of Witness,…

The poems in To Name a Cat intend to capture certain abstractions—grief, love, betrayal, wonder, relativity, and, of course, expectation—in approachable anecdotes that, when brought together, create a narrative about loss that is, nevertheless, laced with hope. The work often relies on an animal, particularly the cat, as a vehicle…

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…

The Book of Mortimer is a satirical account about the rise of a new modern day Mormon woman prophet named Champ. The mother of six—and wife to a very codependent man that can’t be left alone with a comfortable couch—believes a new testament is buried in a small field…

The Cries of La Corrida is a longing for homeland. These poems, written in a blend of English and Castilian, are about an American discovering a hidden self, what it means to be Spanish having only experienced that part of his heritage in glimpses. Comprised of three parts, The Cries…

The poems in sign on the dotted line to release the record force the gaze to the grotesque & complexity in the pregnant body, to the failure of the medical system, to the mother in birth. With hard syntax & unflinching language, the work spools synaptic lyrics into a graphic…

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…

The Wilting Tree is a collection of poems that explores family as the first and final frontier of human connection and understanding. Through three primary narrative threads (parents, siblings and the individual member), the poems excavate the love, longing, betrayal, violence, enigma, joy, humor, compromise, ambivalence, resilience and inevitability that’s…