The Department for Wandering Ghosts Pubblico

Abstract

This collection of poetry explores the boundaries of the body-human or otherwise-focusing on the body as a locus for inheritance. Over the course of the collection, I move from probing directly into the body's interior to questioning the way that we might think about our physical selves as entities that accumulate over time. Anomalous, animal, and female bodies in particular play a large part in these poems, as they demonstrate the ways in which the body can mutate or perform strange feats of multiplicity and ambiguity. The pregnant female body, in its ability to be occupied by or wholly connected to another person, is especially tied to concepts of inheritance. A woman's body can contain more than one person at a time; she is simultaneously both herself and her ghostly image, both mother and child. From DNA coding to family histories, our selves are palimpsests of other people. History is a ghost of other histories. Through the exploration of these concepts, this collection asks: what do our bodies leave behind? In these poems, residue from past actions and memories repeats across time and place. People, events, and images recur in multiple poems, leaving afterimages within the collection at the same time that the poems themselves are afterimages of history and memory, real and imagined. After all, what are poems if not ghosts?

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Found Autopsy 1 These Days I Hear Du Pré 2 Cell 3 Forty Years 4 Keys to Missing Teeth 5

The Moment When You Fell in Love in the Kitchen of an Atlantic City Casino 6

The Ossified Man 7 Their Nymphs Emerge in June 8 Lucy 9 Landscape with Fish 10 Sediment Days 11 Underground Sonnet 12 Teratoma 13 Hooks and Eyes 14 Father to Son 15 Please Bring Me Back My Head 16

Study for Princeton Battlefield 17

Grass 18 Fault 19 A Natural History of Sleep 20 Perennials Are Endless 21 The Enamelist 23 Button Baby 24 Five Daughters, Six Specters 25 To Paint the Portrait of an Ossuary 26 Minor Prophets 28 The Missing Link 30 Source Mythologies 31 Sand Shark Impression 32 Shark Triptych 33 The Department for Wandering Ghosts 36

About this Honors Thesis

Rights statement

• Permission granted by the author to include this thesis or dissertation in this repository. All rights reserved by the author. Please contact the author for information regarding the reproduction and use of this thesis or dissertation.

School	Emory College
Department	English and Creative Writing
Degree	BA
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, General Women's Studies
Parola chiave	Ghost Women Body Inheritance Palimpsest
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Covey, Bruce, Emory University
Committee Members	Williams, Lynna, Emory University Pastan, Elizabeth, Emory University Trethewey, Natasha, Emory University

Ultima modifica

Primary PDF

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Actions
	The Department for Wandering Ghosts ()	2018-08-28 12:59:20 -0400	Press to Select an action Download

Supplemental Files

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Actions