To Be Brought Back

Date of Award

Winter 2025

Project Type

Thesis

Departments (Collect)

English

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

First Advisor

Diannely Antigua

Second Advisor

David Blair

Third Advisor

Shelley Girdner

Abstract

To Be Brought Back is a collection of poems centered on illness, recovering, queerness, faith, trauma, and healing. Considered individually, these poems were less than linear, with a wide range of emotional themes and voices. The challenge became compiling them into a focused collection. Through reflection, one central idea surfaced: treatment. From hospitalizations to community care to self-destruction, each poem engages with the idea of intervention, whether medically, spiritually, or interpersonally. Organizing the thesis into a set of clinical codes allowed medical language to serve as a structural throughline, providing context for the collection through its own emerging mythology.

These poems walk a fine line between self-destruction and survival. As they teeter toward either edge, one truth remains: the speaker continues searching for ways to heal, cope, and move forward, as anyone undergoing treatment for a chronic condition does. As each poem found its way into the thesis, and into its respective code, this structure aligned itself with a chronically ill speaker whose experiences have, almost entirely, unfolded through illness.

The collection lives in a state of crisis, even in its moments of quiet under Code Clear. Moving between violence and tenderness, its shifting language, forms, and narrative modes reach towards articulating truths the speaker believes to be unspeakable. Ultimately, the collection obsesses over a single question; how can a body “too bent to be brought back” find comfort in transformation? It is not a return to the original self, but a slow turning toward acceptance, as the speaker learns to stop resisting change, consequence, and the inevitability of rebirth.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS