Type

Text

Type

Thesis

Advisor

Advisors: Sheehan, Julie; Walker, Lou Ann; Diaz, Natalie

Date

2017-12-01

Keywords

Creative writing

Department

Department of Creative Writing and Literature | Thesis

Language

en

Source

This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.

Identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/11401/78300

Publisher

The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.

Format

application/pdf

Abstract

“When the Signals Come Home” is a hybrid poetry and prose collection in which I explore complex familial bonds alongside race, gender, culture and community. A majority of the pieces in the manuscript are ekphrastic poems inspired by music, art, film, mythology and literature. The poems, in turn, are broken up by brief memoir pieces, or “interludes.” There are three books that I credit with inspiring the overall conception of the book. They are: 1. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, which also demonstrates a blending of forms. 2. Boy With Thorn by Rickey Laurentiis uses ekphrastic poetry to convey the complexities of racial and sexual identity. 3. When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz uses poetry to communicate not only the adversity faced by Indigenous people but also the struggles the Diaz’s family faced in the wake of her brother’s addiction to crystal meth. While several members of my family make appearances within my work, my father is featured significantly throughout. Several poems and all of the prose pieces revolve around my relationship with my family, spanning from my childhood (“Waiting for Dinner at Warren Street,” “Garden Interludes I-IV”) to his hospitalization in the present (“The Hospital,” “Father’s Day 2017,” all the “Interludes” in Side One). My overall goal was to portray him as a complicated figure in my life: both as a man capable of affection, vulnerability and humor as well as a cruel, authoritative figure able to provoke such conflicting feelings within me and all the people he succeeded in alienating. | 69 pages

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