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Publication Date

5-2015

Date of Final Oral Examination (Defense)

2-27-2015

Type of Culminating Activity

Thesis - Boise State University Access Only

Degree Title

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

Department

English

Supervisory Committee Chair

Martin Corless-Smith, Ph.D.

Supervisory Committee Member

Janet Holmes, M.F.A.

Supervisory Committee Member

Kerri Webster, M.F.A.

Abstract

In the last few years, I felt uncomfortably situated between a frantic postmodernity and an earnest sincerity. I think as much is apparent in my manuscript. Each poem in The Travelogues marks a journey, real or imagined; consequently, they manifest as travel or nature poems, wherein the aesthetic of shifting geographies blends with introspection and memory. This emotional content thus inscribes itself into the landscape, creating a poetic form as consistent as the roads on which they were conceived and written.

The Travelogues is a collection of poetry that seeks to escape the quotidian. In so doing, it examines the relationships between person, place, and memory. Each poem chronicles the speaker’s movement through a new and terrible landscape in search of connection. These landscapes, both real and surreal, are barren and inhospitable, void of comfort or humanity. The poems reach a crisis: they become aware of their own artifice and limitations. Ultimately, The Travelogues resigns in failure, yet still makes one last movement toward escape.

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