And Before We Know It, We Are Gone

Date of Award

Spring 2024

Project Type

Thesis

Program or Major

English

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

First Advisor

David Blair

Second Advisor

Diannely Antigua

Third Advisor

Thomas Payne

Abstract

This poetry collection explores a period between July 2022 and December 2023, during which the poet and their partner travelled from Portland, Oregon to Dover, New Hampshire and resided there while the poet was completing an MFA program in creative writing.

The experiences and events of this time are presented out of chronological sequence, simulating an associative chain of memory. The reader is taken back and forth between the “present day” of the poems set in New England and the recent past of the road trip the couple took to get there. Several additional poems recall events that took place many years before the period in question, providing biographical and psychological context. The sequence is broken into sections by a set of untitled, italicized poems that convey the background of the primary travel narrative and the big ideas of the meta-narrative: non-linear time, a looping structure of memory, and the speculative notion that ours is one of many possible worlds.

The collection’s main subjects include the couple’s road trip across the United States in July 2022, the couple’s exploration of the northern New England landscape, the poet’s affection for their partner, the poet’s mental health struggles in earlier days, and the poet’s emergent transfeminine identity.

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