Hewn

Date of Graduation

5-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

English

Advisor/Mentor

McCombs, Davis

Committee Member

Davis, Geffrey M.

Second Committee Member

Brock, Geoffrey A.

Keywords

Alabama; Poetry; Queer Literature; Southern Literature; Transgender

Abstract

The body of poems collected in this thesis encompasses the stages of loving and losing. As a whole, these poems fixate on themes of queerness, grief, identity, denial, and desire. The narrative within this body of work threads through the transformation between innocence and experience. The conflict resides between our exterior and interior lives. The resolution is forgiveness and acceptance. As one identity flows into another, the voice and form of each poem expand and contract. From Bronze Age Scythia to Alexandria in 94 AD to the 1990s in Alabama to the 2020s in Arkansas, this thesis interrogates and explores what it means to exist within a history and within a family. From triolets to sonnets to haibuns to free verse, the poems in Hewn traverse what it means to carve out a body in time. With reactions to the mundane, to the profane, to the surreal, to history, and to art, these poems tether together the developments and alterations of a trans identity over time.

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