Browsing by Author "Meitner, Erika S."
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- Aisha and TeresaSalem, Nora (Virginia Tech, 2016-07-01)A story about two young women from very different backgrounds who are united by friendship and the trauma of sexual assault.
- All-AmericanWilson, Leroy Lamar (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-30)All-American interrogates J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s definition of “American" in the 1782 text, Letters from an American Farmer, which inspired the Eurocentric, sexist and heterosexist ideals girding the notion of what is now called the “American Dream." Mainstream media project narratives that suggest that the ideals in Crevecoeur’s epistles have been fully extended beyond his narrow scope in the Obama era. All-American, however, offers poetry that illuminates modern and contemporary instances in urban and rural settings of racism, colorism, gender bias, ability discrimination and homophobia thwarting this idealistic worldview. Its formal and free verse explores the journey of four generations of one family as members grapple with discrimination, disability and disease and interrogates the heteronormativity and racism that girds the faith to which they cling. Whereas many contemporary poets eschew the confessional in storytelling, All-American employs it unabashedly. Moreover, All-American is interested in language poetry, not only that which plays with various Englishes but also with the languages that color them, that percolate under the surface. It aims to make music of these dialogical languages, these inexorable narratives. It lets the dead and dying tell their stories, which are no less American, though they are unpopular in an America racing to rid itself of past shame. All-American faces the shameful things Americans can do to one another and celebrates humans’ innate will to thrive, love and die with dignity—with hopes of inspiring dialogue and healing that will make American ideals more accessible to those on the periphery.
- The Animal LifeDenton-Edmundson, Matthew (Virginia Tech, 2017-07-20)This thesis puts forward a theory for a new basis of the rights and dignities of animals. The first chapter explains how the neurobiological output / input model can be applied to animal behavior, and suggests that animals—from fruit flies to chimpanzees—and humans are most similar in their desire to experiment with the world around them. The remaining chapters explore the practical implications of considering animals through the output / input model, using literature, the author’s personal experience, biological observations, and historical anecdotes. These chapters seek to prove that animals have much more to offer us than milk and meat.
- The Bass & The BoogeymanWalker, Robert Coleman (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-13)The Bass & The Boogeyman is a manuscript of poems that explores issues of sexuality, gender, and identity. The poems also attempt to reach an understanding of what it means to be a member of a largely marginalized social group (homosexuals). In this explorations and a attempts the poems are also engaged in finding the origins of fear. The poems follow one narrator from childhood into adulthood. While the poems do not provide the type of clear narrative and story arc one would expect from a novel, they do offer a sense of trajectory and reward the reader for reading from cover to cover. This manuscript is very aware of itself as a book and strives to exist as such (rather than as a stack of poems who happen to be in the same place at the same time). The manuscript features several connected poem series that work to provide cohesion to the collection. The poems Boys, Men, and Fags are an example of this connection between poems. Each of these three poems can be read as individual pieces, but when taken together they offer a commentary on all three groups that cannot be gained by reading them separately. The manuscript also employers a cast of repeating characters (the boy & the boogeyman among them) to give the collection the sense of narrative trajectory mention above. Lastly, the manuscript combines numerous traditional poetic forms with a wild and unruly use of pop culture and humor. The end result is proof that funny and serious are not always contradictory terms.
- The Beaten PathosRoche, Michael William (Virginia Tech, 2014-01-07)The Beaten Pathos is a manuscript of poems written by a shelter dog--a shelter dog whose distrust of both his reader-dogs and himself amplifies his need to communicate. More often than not, the result is a poem borne of an imagination both ostentatiously loud and cutting at an oblique angle, like a miter saw. Additionally, a handful of poems are muted and cool (like Miles Davis' trumpet), and, consequently, more direct in their expression of the poet's emotional vulnerability. Whether the poems in this manuscript are of the miter-saw or trumpet variety, their speakers--although frequently not equipped to do so--are earnest about getting and/or making even the most sideways of things right.
- Boarding PassesSimpson, Elias (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-24)This book of poetry represents my best poems written in the last 14 months. The themes that arise are not project themes but personal interests. Chronologically it charts much of my life, beginning before I’m born, and ending in an uncertain future. It focuses primarily on the last five years (trip to France, graduation from college and graduate school, and starting a family). It is not about coming of age, because the speaker doesn’t. Instead it plays with the idea of growing up, the impossibility of it and the inevitability of it. I want it to be a series of paper airplanes to terminals in the airport of everyday life. They are spaces between living that represent life. It can be read chronologically. It could be read backwards. It can be read with feet up or down. The poems like coffee. During takeoff and landing please put seat in upright position, and tray tables up. In the time between beginning and ending the world should change. The book creatively and thoughtfully conveys an emotional understanding that is my own, and that deserves to be shared because it insists on being written down, over and over again.
- Catch ChainTalbert, Robert (Virginia Tech, 2010-12-13)Catch Chain is a book of poems that traces the journey of a Corrections Officer who attempts to combat issues of isolation, inhumane treatment of inmates and societal rejection in jails by embarking upon a cross-country road trip. However, the same issues the officer initially wrestled with begin cropping up in different cities, on various highways and in a multitude of states. The excitement and adventure of the open road runs parallel to the recurring imprisonment of the guard's mind.
- Doubter Come Home from a Drowning of VisionMeadows, Carrie (Virginia Tech, 2009-04-07)A poetry collection in two parts. Slingshot Catapult, the first half of the manuscript, explores the lives of two professional wrestlers. While the spectacle of professional wrestling is the backdrop for this series of linked, narrative poems, the relationship between protagonists Tracy and Dodge and who they are as individuals, rather than the caricatures wrestlers often play, are the core concerns of this opening section. Knotcraft, the second half of the collection, offers a mix of lyric, narrative, and formal poetry. As in Slingshot Catapult, common threads running through and between these poems include family history, romantic relationships, religion, and vision. Readers are invited to draw parallels between themes explored in Knotcraft and Slingshot Catapult.
- A ForecastMoriarty, Megan Marie (Virginia Tech, 2011-04-26)A Forecast is a manuscript of poems that explores themes of longing, loss, uncertainty, time, place, and love. The poems also attempt to explore and adorn these themes through inventiveness and imagination. While inhabiting this imaginative landscape, the poems play with notions of perception, acting as objective witnesses to very subjective persons, places, and things. These poems are held together by their movement through stasis, fascination with weather, seasons, and the future, and the fragmented yet illuminated spaces they occupy, where the extraordinary seems ordinary and the ordinary seems extraordinary. What results is a series of explorations through a dreamlike world, led by a voice who wonders, hesitates, and hides, all the while trying to say something, to shape the world and tug you into it.
- "full water"Murray, Bryan Christopher (Virginia Tech, 2010-05-12)"full water" is a collection of poems examining a single consciousness, from a singular experience, that resonates to generational experiences. full water is a personal and literal landscaping: from the southern calm of Virginia to the innate heartbeat of south Bronx streets, the poems are grounded in a firm sense of place. The personal landscaping strongly connects with this literal landscaping, as this is a collection of someone's constantly leaving, an attempt at establishing identity through the varied parcels of perspective. In the same way, this collection investigates the urban family landscape, the love still possible, despite the conventional shortcomings, the fullness of self, regardless. Through the rhythmic composition of the language, emotion flashes and restrains itself. Within the turns of language, personal truths thrive, in what they don't outwardly say. The book learns its significance from the poems. In the chaos of this, the reader finds kernels of meaning just as the poet did in process.
- Greedy Hunger and Happy RuinYee, Sandra M. (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-12)Greedy Hunger and Happy Ruin is a collection of poems that gathers a life of fragments and frayed ends into a loose narrative of desire, loss, language, and almost redemption. The poems examine the costs of leaving home, as seen in a mermaid's wish to become human, an immigrant family's aspirations of upward mobility, and an immigrant daughter's hunger for U.S. American social/lingual fluency, male attention, and erasure of her difference. The collection follows speakers who, hungry for homes they cannot return to, navigate a landscape crowded with fairy tales, biblical myth, filial duty, and pop culture in search of the perfect lover or dress to transform them from brokenness to wholeness. As they strive for such unattainable ideals, however, these speakers inevitably end up homeless and/or scarred, as exemplified by Joyce Wildenstein's plastic surgery excesses. The speakers in these poems rue their missed chances, lost loves, ageing bodies, and crowded histories of wrong men. They offer their sins in confession but are unsure whether such disclosure can free them from the mistakes that haunt them. Ultimately, Greedy Hunger and Happy Ruin begins to question what we choose to covet and how we choose to reflect on our pasts. The poems' speakers must confront the fantasies and ambitions that govern their lives and discover that transformation and absolution come not from a radiant external source but internal shifts of perspective, moment by moment, memory by memory, towards an embrace of the loss and longing (and joy) that make us human.
- Home EnoughUsselman, Laura (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-06)Home Enough, a short story collection, is concerned with loneliness, anxiety, and a persistent desire for both contentment and transcendence. The collection explores these themes largely through a series of young female protagonists, women who are working their way towards peace in isolation, and joy in moments of connection.
- HullPhillips, Alexandria Marie (Virginia Tech, 2016-12-21)HULL is a manuscript driven by bodily and imagined notions of witness that marry and complicate the historical and public with the personal and private. HULL is the buoyancy of a paradox; the un-shakable hyper corporeality of a body both Black and woman, and the social and spiritual liminality of Black womanhood. This collection is centered around a contemporary Black, queer, femme voice, and moves beyond the deeply familiar, beyond any implied monolith of definitive Blackness. These poems navigate memory, both experienced and inherited to chart moments of tenderness and brutality that people within the African Diaspora have experienced.
- The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential GhostsPalmer, Soraya Jennalee (Virginia Tech, 2014-05-08)The following manuscript is a collection of linked stories that follows a family from Jamaica and Trinidad to the U.S. and back. The collection focuses on two sisters' episodic journey through their sexual awakenings, their mother's illness, their father's violence and absence. In the process, the sisters come to terms with their own hybrid identities. In writing this book, I drew not only from my personal experience, but also from extensive research both in Trinidad and Tobago and in books and oral histories. The enclosed stories include, "What's My Name?" which is told from the point of view of oral history personified--a narrator trying to break free from "dominant narrative." In this way, my work aims to challenge the nature of narrative itself. Other pieces such as, "Taino Instructions for Communicating with Dead Mothers," re-purpose historical figures into present day in order to create a mythic ghost story.
- Ideal CitiesMeitner, Erika S. (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2012-09)Erika Meitner discusses her new book: Ideal Cities. This collection of autobiographical narrative and lyric poems explores the relationship between body and place—specifically the pleasures and dangers of women’s corporeal experiences. Ideal Cities is guided by an epigraph from Song of Songs, and the metaphorical idea of bodies as cities, and cities as bodies. How do women’s bodies become sites of inscription via sex, childbirth, and other highly physical acts? These poems also investigate urban, suburban, and rural borderlands. Who do we leave behind or look past? What do we discard, as purposeful markers or accidental refuse? How can these people, places, and objects be woven into larger ideas about nature, sense of place, home, exile, and both personal and collective memory?
- If You Insist on Being Injured, I Will Be the One to Injure YouVance, Amy (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-18)The stories in this collection exist somewhere between the formalist and the fabulist. I use writing to explore topics that interest me such as beauty, movies, reality, and mothers. I hope these stories are ingrained with unexpected surprises and humor. There are elements of absurdism in my stories. However, my work is not an artifact of a political or philosophical ideal. My work is an artifact of who I am.
- Intersections: Interdisciplinary conversations about social justice and the built environment – “The Local”Bohannon, C. L.; Borowski, Michael; Meitner, Erika S. (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2016-11-09)The inaugural panel discussion of a new CAUS Diversity Committee initiative: Intersections: interdisciplinary conversations about social justice and the built environment. Our first panel topic is “The Local,” and the three VT faculty panelists are C.L. Bohannon, Landscape Architect, School of Architecture + Design; Michael Borowski, Artist + Photographer, School of Visual Art; Erika Meitner, Poet, Department of English. This initiative intends to spark conversations and create an ongoing dialogue about social justice and the built environment. By asking questions about how architecture and design can reinforce/question/break down existing social structures, the hope is to raise awareness of these issues within CAUS and beyond. The initiative takes its starting point in student interest in the proposition that “architecture can be a transformative engine for change” (as stated by Architect Michael Murphy in his February 2016 TED talk). We hope this spark will lead to broad conversations across Virginia Tech and beyond.
- Intersections: ResilienceFranze, Simone; Hester, Rebecca; Meitner, Erika S.; Lawrence, Jennifer (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2018-11-07)This discussion panel unpacks the political, economic, and social impacts of resilience. Panelists speak to resilience in the trade industry, climate change, the human body, and the commonalities between the three.
- Last Rites for UptownFields, Raina Lauren (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-10)This autobiographical poetry collection is about identity, belonging, and brokenness, dealing with the aftermath of a dead mother, a deadbeat father, and a decaying home filled with years of trash and memory. In many ways, this collection is a buildungsroman. For me, what seem like ordinary questions become a journey into memories and experiences that were once repressed. As a child of a hoarder, one who fielded questions from family, friends, and the Department of Human Service for almost twenty years, I am just starting to confidently address the many silences that were and are present in my family: my mother’s quest to hide her breast cancer and her subsequent death as a result of her secrecy; my father’s four other children that I have never met; and my grandparents’ military history spanning three continents in the 1950s and 1960s.
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