Letters for Burning

This creative thesis is a collection of poems and lyric forms that explore queer identity and difference through the fraught navigation of heteronormative spaces and institutions such as the American school system, the Catholic Church, and marriage. Included are letters-as-poems, journal fragments, and extended lyrical sequences that serve to highlight the significance of community and chosen family to queer identity. When they aren’t addressed to an imagined recipient, they are dedicated to or in conversation with friends, family, lovers, strangers, past selves, and other writers. Although the three sections (LETTERS, FIRE, and HEARTH) that demarcate this work chart a thematic chronology that organizes stages of a queer life, memory isn’t cleanly linear. Poems pour into and echo each other, signifying embodied history in the present and the past’s bearings on queer (re)imaginings of the future.