Award Date
5-15-2018
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English
First Committee Member
Donald Revell
Second Committee Member
Claudia Keelan
Third Committee Member
Lynn Comella
Fourth Committee Member
Emily Setina
Number of Pages
56
Abstract
Narrativization can empower us to reach beyond our loss and act as a trauma healer. This collection uses myth and spirituality to interrogate that suffering. Concerned with both physical and mystic bodies, the characters in these poems are reborn into new paradigms, attempting to diffuse loss (of dignity, hope, identity), and transform that injury into empowerment.
These poems explore those painful experiences through dreams and nonlinear magical visions, drawing from Surrealists painters like Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte, whose dreamlike style informs the images in this collection.
Mysticism is essential to this work. The poems are meditations on death, love, and pain. The three parts, Dream Incubation, Retrograde, and House of Saints, represent the three phases of transcendence in the Buddhist understanding, with focus on the Bardo state, or the liminal state, which is the period after death but before rebirth, involving the detachment of one’s self from the body. These themes are informed by readings from Anne Carson, Simone Weil, and Mary Ruefle, as well as from the beliefs of Santería, translated from Spanish to mean “worship of saints,” a religion practiced in the Caribbean and West Africa.
At times embodying the personas of jezebels and femme fatales, the collection proposes that suffering can grant us access to a spiritual rebirth; it is a journey for wholeness, of destroying origin, and remaking of the self.
Disciplines
Creative Writing
File Format
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Williams, Gabrielle Faith, "Cosmic Valentine" (2018). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 3345.
http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/13568791
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/