DECENT WINGS

Date of Award

Spring 2026

Abstract

Being young means teetering between knowing everything and not knowing anything. It means feeling different types of pain for the first time. DECENT WINGS talks about young people who don’t fully understand how the world works or what they even could do better next time after coming up short. Swaying between real and surreal, the poems are presented as individual episodes of a longer coming-of-age tale. The speaker wades through a wasteland of memories and tries to dissect what it all means through the art of retelling. The speaker cracks inside jokes and tries to pick girls up at the bar. They struggle with substances without a course of action other than damage control or doubling down. They consider family and the implications of believing in something. They live in a vortex of heartbreak, experimentation, and falling for people with no safety net. Formally, a variety of shapes and sizes appear in accordance to how playful the speaker is feeling. There are more short poems than long poems. Poems are often one or two prerequisites away from being a recognized from. There is an argument for beauty and brokenness at the same time. The poems ask for forgiveness as long as the reader enjoys them. In this way, DECENT WINGS thinks about modern poetry as an accessible form of entertainment again, aligning itself with readers ready for something fun, crass, self-aware, and sad.

Document Type

Master's Thesis

First Advisor

Diannely Antigua

Second Advisor

David Blair

Third Advisor

James Rioux

Department or Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

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