Pifer, Lee E.

The poems of this thesis take the reader to primal places of the mind, body, and soul, often considered better left unspoken or unseen. These places are no doubt dark and full of strange dreams. Here, relationships have a lack of resolution and, of course, are engineered by pleasure and pain. Pain is fire, ice, or reflection. Pleasure is also pain. It is all an eternal dance. Pain gives pleasure meaning and vice versa, like violence and passion. There is a pleasure in the heat rising from a red bottom, and a beauty in that image. I challenge social customs and emotional aversions with my imagery. I utilize rhyme and a lack of punctuation to disturb boundaries as dreams do, or other malleable states of living. I focus on the intangible trauma of self-destruction in the pursuit of creativity, intimacy, and expression. In simpler terms, the poems of this thesis have been caught having a threesome with sex and death. Tempted to peek?