Theses and Dissertations Collection

These poems represent the struggle to fill voids in our fallible memory that may or may not have been caused by loss of concrete people and things, and what memory, as an imaginative mechanism, chooses to create in place of actuality. From dreams to film to various outside texts, the speaker participates in a narrative arc of consuming and projecting himself onto the world, hoping to bite down on a conclusion to end his cycles of grief, only to arrive at the possibility that the actual principle of conclusion might be to present these engagements as their own artifact of impermanence: Accept the people, his role as son, and certain short-term memories which have all been “vanished”. The collection ends on the edge of an answer to the question: is it paradoxical and futile to use a tool of remembrance to repair or understand itself?