Life with Wings: Poems

Date of Graduation

5-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

English

Advisor/Mentor

Davis, Geffrey M.

Committee Member

Howell, Rebecca G.

Second Committee Member

McCombs, Davis

Keywords

LGBT Studies; Poetry; Southern Studies

Abstract

Life with Wings is a full-length poetry collection which examines how a body—a trans nonbinary body, a chronically ill body, a body carrying familial and relationship trauma— navigates various environments alongside the markers of identity and memory. Poems follow a speaker coming into their understanding of a more authentic self amidst a hostile sociopolitical climate, bouts of physical illness, and confrontations with childhood trauma. At the same time, the collection widens its view to interrogate the historical violences of white supremacy and settler colonialism across Southern California and the Upper South. As an inhabitant of the regions, the speaker grapples with their inherent implication in systems of displacement and erasure. Poems face the contemporary manifestations of these forces identified as patterns of gentrification, ecological degradation, and transphobic backlash. It is through a deep reckoning with personal and historical pasts that the speaker comes to claim an embodied agency while moving through different spaces and landscapes.

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