Abstract

At the center of this collection of poems lies the question: is there meaning beyond language? and my reconfiguration of that question as, is there God? I aim to answer what is fundamentally an unanswerable question through poetics, insofar as poetry gestures towards the unresolvable. This inquiry is concerned with silence, and poetry mediates both what language can, and cannot contain (see: enjambment, dashes, virgules, line and stanza breaks). Through lyric, narrative, and citational poetics, the poems write out of and around the aforementioned hole(s), whose genealogy can be traced from apophatic (or negative) theology, to develop a poetics of this emptiness. Central to the project are themes of eros, lack, queerness, sex, (post-)Catholicism, as well the works of Anne Carson and Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly the seventh proposition of the latter’s Tractatus: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”