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…

A collection of poems that explore what it means to be from the Atomic City-- a city built atop cleared-out rural communities in East Tennessee during World War II, and with the sole and secretive purpose of enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. The poems look back to the more…

Ranging in subject from a Tuareg festival outside Timbuktu to the 1975 "Battle of the Sexes" race at Belmont track to a Mississippi classroom in the Delta flood plains, the poems in The Body Snatcher's Complaint explore the blurring of self hood, a feeling of foreignness within one's own physical…

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.…

The poems in Every House find themselves exploring spaces of expected comfort and asking how survivors reconstruct safety in their worlds when the beautiful is burnt to the ground. With little more than memory, maybe a photograph, or the chorus of a song, these poems mean to tell a truth…

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,…

Waltz, is a collection of poems written to play along the boundaries between sound, language, and meaning. As a vehicle for exploration, the poems in Waltz, commandeer themes of nostalgia, love, loss, and abstraction, all of which build up and break each other down to create something of a nonlinear…

Same Bed is a twelve-piece book of poetry that explores the theme of sexual violence. The speaker of the poems is processing the trauma surrounding her rape which leads her to explore her own family's dynamics regarding gender, power, and acknowledgment of sexuality. The speaker also observes the broader issue…

This project focuses on techniques contemporary American poets use in their work. Ten different poetry collections are analyzed for dominant writing styles and techniques, which I then apply to my own poems, concentrating on modeling that particular poet. I then reflect on those poems through an evaluation of my writing…

Abstract The Space Between Us is a poetic project about the grieving process. Formally, the piece is seven sections of prose couched within a crown of seven sonnets. The first-person sections of prose allow for personal discussion in the confessional tradition of my own lived experience of grief, while the…