M.F.A., English Language and Literature
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Item The Milling RoomsLee, Michael (2022-12)In his Eulogy for Franz Ferdinand in July 1914, Karl Kraus wrote that Austria was a “laboratory of the apocalypse”. A month later, Europe erupted into total war on an industrial scale yet unseen: poison gas, concentration camps, machine guns, flamethrowers, and aerial bombardments. Yet nearly all of these new weapons of mass slaughter had already been used in Europe's colonies. The Maxim gun was first used by the British against the Matabele, the Germans innovated the concentration camp in the genocide of the Herrero and Nama people, and Italy carried out the first recorded aerial and chemical attacks in Ethiopia. If Kraus was right that the heart of one of Europe’s “great” empires was a laboratory for apocalypse, then it was doubly the case that the colonial periphery beyond Europe’s metropoles were also laboratories of apocalypse, without which World War One would not have been possible. The psychological and material framework required to enact colonial genocides were the same required to enact similar violences against one’s neighbors. Where geographical distance was minimal, the imagined and narrative distances became nearly as vast. This collection of poetry, The Milling Rooms racks interrelated projects of Western colonialism, Nation-building and industrialization as vectors of apocalypse, positioning apocalypse not as a future possibility but as a present condition, historical precedent and policy position. From the advent of the guillotine, the machine gun, and cast-steel to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, American Westward Expansion, the industrial slaughterhouse and Nazi death camps, the poems within this book illuminate and indict these networks of terror less as perfectly linear processes with clear beginnings and endings, and more a genealogical constellation of events and ideas. Beyond simply identifying these relationships, The Milling Rooms examines how these apocalyptic logics have shaped race, place, memory/imagination, the idea of the human, and relationships to violence and nature in the 20th and 21st centuries. How has the evolution of State sanctioned executions shaped our understanding of citizenship and public/private space? How did railroads and industrial slaughterhouses map a blueprint for modern war and the Holocaust? Where in our daily lives can we witness (and apprehend) these legacies of horror?Item The NudeRaisin, Courtney (2022-12)Item in pre: tendHackle, India (2022-12)Item Item The State of My HeartJuarez, Rogelio (2022-12)Item Post-Volcanic Folk TalesDonnelly, Mackenzie (2022-12)A bouquet of (auto)biomythographic folk tales, Post-Volcanic Folk Tales gravitates around my grandmother's narrative, political persecution, wartime sexual violence country-wide, a profoundly painful migration drenched in desperation and reluctance, matrilineal devotion and disability, and reconciling being in a body experiencing a systemic autoimmune response. An evident string joining sections of my manuscript, I write about a psychic phantom umbilical cord that survives (or is preserved) over generations of women, interrogating transgenerational traumatic repetitions from the perspective of an inheritor; a third generation (though I do not feel this removed) Hungarian woman who was fed stories of war, occupation, displacement, and departure like milk, bread, vegetables, and meat. From the perspective of one for whom homesickness (its pea green persistence) was regurgitated directly into the open mouth. I explore nonlinearities of time and playful yet painful imaginings of wished for transtemporal teleportation (being again with my grandmother in flesh, further receiving narrative) and multiplicities or multidimensionalities of home-making. What is home––how do we define it and how are we defined by it? What does a home hold? What histories purl within it? Post-Volcanic Folk Tales chronicles the erosion of memory by dementia. I write about complications and imperfections of memory and retrieval. I honor the stories my grandmother did share (when lucid and when not), the stories she did not share, and the stories she could no longer share. I invoke her. I visit her. I inquire about healing. I am desperate for her. To memorialize her. To touch what she touched without the prospect of touching.Item Item Erratic RadioHewitt, Christopher Matthew (2019-12)This manuscript contains 37 poems about a variety of topics.Item Universal PayphoneBarnes, Remy (2019-12)Item Item Interlocutor GoddessReid, Jasmine (2020-12)From the Latin meaning “secret” or “non-canonical,” apocrypha denotes a statement or story of doubtful authenticity or unknown authorship. So disbelieved, the set of texts known as the biblical apocrypha have been excised & set aside from the main body of the Bible. As a container for my manuscript-in-progress, I call upon apocrypha’s esoteric and hidden-away holiness, and so name Apocrypha divinity of the supra-canonical, goddess of excess by way of disbelief. Enacted in this manuscript is an interlocution of self & body, a configuration outside of canonical human experience, trans speakers who so find posterity and futurity in the surround of human being: flowers, seasons, satellitic cyclings, the processual churnings of dirt. I am thinking here about the self as an excess/overwhelm/catastrophe physic, in that the oppressive architectures these speakers enter they exceed & are in remainder of. These poems exist in the locus of canons anti-Blackness, homophobia, and transmisogyny. These poems exist in the beyond thereof. Hereto, devastated are the logics & misbeliefs which labor such confinements into being. The poetic which labors here combusts these oppressive architectures with the quintessence of a self. Formally, I am writing to enact catastrophes of sound, image, form, and page, in order to recover the body—these Black, queer, trans, woman bodies—as a site of renewal and possibility. In the absence of verifiable origin, Interlocutor Goddess contains lyric cosmologies, seeks the divine inside of marginalized being.Item And They All FallMcCray, Anastasia (2020-12)And They All Fall is a collection of experimental poetry in Afrofuturism dealing with how Blackness warps time, space, and history. From biblical retellings and apocalypse narratives to star-mapping and plague-charting, this manuscript aims to push the boundaries of how stories are told by breaking out of the traditional formats that bind them.Item BlushRhee, Alice (2021-12)Item The Water HouseIke-Njoku, Nneoma (2019-12)Item Item Hood Hunting, A Novel & Other StoriesRomero, Robert (2021-12)Item Queen of the DryadsVeltfort, Sophia (2020-12)ABSTRACT In _Queen of the Dryads_, women navigate the competing narratives and projections that structure their lives. They read and misread; they negotiate and misconstrue. They confront moments when such fictions come into conflict or face disruption.Item Gas Stations of New MexicoHand, Ashley (2020-12)Gas Stations of New Mexico is a collection of short stories, many of which are linked, that explores the nature of love, friendship, heartbreak, wealth divide, PTSD, and female sexuality.Item TRIMMakridis, Elisávet (2021-12)Item Box Car Joy RideGomez, Carlos Rafael (2020-12)BOX CAR JOY RIDE, 122k words, is a literary fiction, coming-of-age novel about loss, love, and legacy within a Cuban-American family. Narrated by Julian Martínez, Jr., BCJR follows dual timelines set in alternating chapters: the first starts in Revolution-era Cuba and traces Julian’s father’s life from birth in Havana through his career in end-of-life care to his suicide, the night of Julian Jr.’s 18th birthday. The second, interwoven timeline begins a couple months after the suicide, as Julian Jr. leaves home in Charlottesville, Virginia for college, a long-coveted world of wealth and privilege, where he seeks unsuccessfully an adult identity separate from that of his father. As we learn about Julian Sr.'s life—drug addiction, depression, eventually coming out as gay—we see how it informs and interacts with Julian Jr.'s present, jumpstarting an uncomfortable recognition, reexamination, and reckoning with the man Julian Jr. thought he'd laid to rest for good. The novel explores the continued evolution of a relationship post-mortem, touching on themes of mental illness; sexual, ethnic, gender identity; love and class.
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