Thirst

Abstract

Thirst is a collection of poems examining the speaker's relationship with his alcoholic father, and the paradox of writing toward a subject who resists being written about. Moving through ghazals, villanelles, prose poems, questionnaires, and fragment poems, the collection treats formal restlessness as an ethical stance — the speaker's incomplete knowledge of his father is at the heart of the book's narrative structure. Recurring motifs — whales, wolves, mirrors, birds, and the gut as a central bodily site — bind the poems into a unified imaginative world. Drawing on influences including Leonard Cohen, Bob Hicok, Alejandra Pizarnik, Franz Wright, Agha Shahid Ali, and Mohammed Rafi, Thirst argues that form must enact, rather than describe, the conditions of its making: to write toward a resistant father is to inherit his silences and to build, from refusal, a language for what cannot be said directly.