Poetry

Behind Dasheen Leaves is a collection of poems that is challenged by the resonance of the Caribbean post-colonial voice. It is a challenge that this collection brazenly battles, as it avoids exoticizing the work, while it submerges the reader in cultural representations. The poems are manifestations of religious syncretism, multiculturalism, and feminist ideas. Behind Dasheen Leaves affects the reader by depicting the products of colonialism while evoking human emotions and experiences. The characters in this collection experience loss, and they struggle with the inability to define self in a society of miscegenation and assimilation. The syncretistic nature of the poems and the lives of the speakers within the poems force the reader to define self in respect to religion, culture, and other societal components evident in the work. Behind Dasheen Leaves normalizes the universe (for its characters, readers, and of course for its writer) as it serves as an emotional, linguistic, and vivid retention of what can no longer be described as lost heritage or history.

Notes on a Liminal State is a collection of poetry prepared in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in writing at Florida Atlantic University. While the poems cover a variety of topics, recurring themes include a mother's decline due to Alzheimer's Disease, infertility, adoption, and the observation of rural landscapes. The poems do not adhere to any single form.

The Eulogist hastens along two structural/narrative approaches: the narrative sequence form and how it relays a poetic narrative in newer and more unique ways, and a dialogic approach I've termed a perpetual tense, where a variety of voices representing a variety of temporal realities are given agency to perform within the same space at the same time. Both approaches stem from my own philosophical views in response to such grandiose ideas as "language," "life," "moments," "love," etc., and how reversible they seem. I respond by offering a common denominator that appears to exist amongst these ideas: the presence of desperation that feels to be the only tangible element perpetually moving forward, represented within the narratives of the manuscript's four main characters: Hero, Heroine, Marvelous Swab (The Eulogist) and myself (The Eulogist). Ultimately, the resolution is found within each character's response to their desperation as well as their rationalizations behind each response.

Here, the natural world is consumed - a physical reality and an internal one. It is walled, but roofless - a contained space. Elements are absorbed, same energies interacting within us that work around us - the natural forces of gravitation and electromagnetism, fire and water, growth, and time. Fundamental interactions in nature, forces that hold the universe together are treated as symbolic of the human experience. The sense of rooflessness is an essential theme to my thesis. There is a constant return to the sky. The shifting clouds, the stages of the sun and the moon mimic a traveling through time, a constant change. There is a given feeling of freedom and confinement. There is a vulnerability, a destitution, and a lack of shelter. The open sky, always out of reach, is a tease to be free. Though it also hints at a feeling of oneness, a symbolic relation between the divine and the human. The open, uninterrupted path for direct prayer. Roofless indicates a continuous linkage between the ground and the sky, between rain and dirt, between nature and humankind. .

Wool and Water is a creative work of 36 poems. This collection examines the relationship between the silent and vocal, between the pastoral and urban. By reconfiguring and retelling the fairy tales and nursery rhymes, this collection seeks to challenge the status quo through trickster-like diction. Themes that are prevalent include: alienation, nourishment, anonymity, and the female body. From the concrete to the lyric, Wool and Water relies upon the process of questioning patriarchal guises. These poems intersect in order to rectify the past and make amends with the present. The female voices that drive these poems are multi-generational.

This collection of poems engages narratives of geographical and emotional displacement on a journey toward a place from which to begin writing. The inciting narrative is one of travel - Brazil, to England, and to adulthood. A second narrative emerges as a gradual realization that these first displacements will never be truly resolved and that this lack of resolution is the only occasion from which to write. As the collection continues, the speaker of these poems is less and less comfortable with pronouncement and more and more comfortable with action. The act of doing something - moving, driving, walking, escaping, returning, floating down a river of ice - is what creates the silence needed to proceed. Through the body, deafening directives can be temporarily suspended.

The works of Romantic poet William Wordsworth are generally regarded as idealistic nature poems. However, Wordsworth was writing in a turbulent era, between the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to conventional labels, Wordsworth's prose and poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries strongly critiques social and economic affairs, similar to the ways Thomas Malthus comments on the same subjects. In 1798, political and economic theorist Thomas Robert Malthus published his infamous Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he devotes considerable thought to the subjects of poverty and England's Old Poor Law system. This thesis explores the connections between Wordsworth and Malthus, establishing Wordsworth as an amateur political economic theorist, who was concerned with the contemporary treatment of poverty and the morals of the legislators of the Poor Laws. I further claim that Wordsworth was a parable-poet, who sought to provide moral guidance regarding poor relief through affective poetry.