Abstract

The following poetry collection features various women, all fragments of a whole figure, whose desired progress from being obscured bodies robbed of agency to being prominent persons successfully engaging in their surrounding environments is constantly interrupted. These interruptions occur as syntactic discord, unexpected emphases, violent or disturbing imagery, and opaque speaking subjects. The reader’s attention is constantly diverted from what may seem the central subject of the poem, the women themselves disappearing even as the command to keep eyes upon them is delivered. As the city of these poems envelops and overwhelms its subject, the portraits increasingly come to be of stagnancy and frustration, but an underlying desire to move and to be moved accompanies the intimacy and absurdity. The collection, as an entirety, strives to reflect the female’s skewed and changeable perception of herself. Eventually, out of frightening, wounded, and inspiring personae, a self-affirming voice arises.

Within the collection, found poetry interrupts the lyric self. These direct instances of outside text speak in an attempt to locate the female body within their borrowed tonalities. The insertion of found texts—clinical breathing and movement manuals; writing by thinkers and poets; quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary; descriptions produced from photographs; and dialogue taken from films and recordings—produces poems that affect less personalized voices, thus transforming staggered and incomplete experiences into collectively shared histories.