Theses and Dissertations Collection

“In the End, the Motel Eats Us” is a collection of poems exploring various materializations of modern American isolation, alienation, and anxiety, through both personal and societal lenses. The collection sets out with a general awareness that these issues might have something to do with place, class divisions, technology, and other influences, but the unnamed speaker at the center of the collection comes to understand, over time, that the aforementioned issues often originate within the self, and that to overcome them, a thorough interrogation of the self—including investigations of their own various privileges, ignorances, and mistakes—is necessary. By the end of the collection, the speaker has established a broader, more intimate relationship with the surrounding world, though, of course, no complete resolution is ultimately found. Instead, the collection presents itself as a small sample of what it understands as an endless catalogue of questions one can ask themselves and the world around them.