Award Date

5-1-2021

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

José Roach Orduña

Fourth Committee Member

Aya McDonald

Number of Pages

57

Abstract

The following manuscript, “Soft Machinery”, serves as an creative autobiographical narrative account of the author’s marital separation and subsequent exploration of the feminine, family, and geographical place. The piece functions together as a narrative whole, with prose poems working as connective tissue between shorter form, traditional poems. While “Soft Machinery” does form around plot beats, the individual poems play into and against linear narrative in their organization and form, creating a loose story structure that imitates the thematic recurrence of memory, loss, and momentary focus in the piece. Intimate, playful moments of relational vulnerability constrict and expand alongside expressions of grief and staleness through the lens of the body. These moments, in their organization, attempt a sort of joyous whiplash while developing an emotional wholeness in the piece through their display of conflicting yet coexisting feelings. Addiction, separation, generational and cyclical family suffering, happen simultaneously with revelry, burgeoning friendship, sexuality and self discovery. Landscape is shaped by emotion and emotion by landscape. The inclusion of translation speaks to place as well, tying moments to geography and broadening scope. The title of the manuscript, “Soft Machinery” wants to reflect the ways the body, feeling, and place work sinuously in developing narrative and personal history. This work will see further development with multimodal, visual and found-text inclusions in order to bring the content to intimate life.

Keywords

Poetry

Disciplines

Creative Writing | Political Science

File Format

pdf

File Size

458 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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Available for download on Monday, May 15, 2028


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