Her Manifest

Abstract

Her Manifest is a hybrid work that examines themes of autonomy, identity, surreality, technology, and love through the dual narrative of the protagonist's dreams and waking life as she descends into the dark and complex web of her town's supernatural underbelly and begins to have strange dreams of her clone. Because dreams operate through fragmentation and an associative logic that is similar to poetry, the protagonist's dreams are written as poems of diverse hybrid forms, shapeshifting according to the needs of the dreams' kaleidoscopic and wide-ranging perspectives, sensations, and worlds. These are verse poems, prose poems, concrete poems, scripts, collages, and visual poems. The sometimes lyrical prose of her waking life provides the material and occasion for her dreams, and as such, works in service of them, frequently taking on a supportive and even secondary role in the work. As the narrative develops, the boundary between these two modes breaks down in places, collapsing the line between corporeal and extracorporeal realities and asking us to consider how we influence our dreams, how our dreams influence us, and how that slippage contributes to the construction of selfhood.