Date of Award
Spring 2021
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Department
English Language and Literatures
First Advisor
Elizabeth Countryman
Abstract
Informed by the intersection of region, personal history, and religion, this manuscript embraces the pastoral world with transgressive and coy humor. The reader of this collection is invited into an idiosyncratic understanding of rural and urban spaces in the Great Lakes region. Often, these spaces are haunted by ghosts, demons, and even the living who wander landscapes that are at once threatening and familiar. These poems include various characters, including amalgams representing the speaker’s father, grandfather, God, and other masculine presences. The bodies in these poems remember loss vividly, and both the phantoms and the speaker are perplexed as to why they have been summoned and what is expected of them. The manuscript pairs narrative immediacy with intricate orchestration, constructing a kind of writing that hurries the reader along while also reaching back to the echoes of earlier moments. Ultimately, these poems seek peace through negotiating an apprehension of beauty and the importance of rationality.
Rights
© 2021, Katarina Merlini
Recommended Citation
Merlini, K.(2021). Lake Water Inventory. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/6214