Fuoco, Dante2024-05-102024-05-102024-05-09vt_gsexam:40586https://hdl.handle.net/10919/118943A King Dyed Pink is Doomed to Die is a poetry collection concerned with cruelties waged against queer people—how even the most seemingly innocuous habits of cishet society proliferate a vast catalog of ongoing violence, from microaggressions to murder. Disrupting the accompanying complicity of silence (mine and others') involves not only invoking a propulsive "I" lyric (at once playful and elegiac, confessional and enraged, horny and ashamed) but also creating an unabashed mess of formal modes (theater, journalism, surrealism, visuality, 21st century technology) that, unlike heteronormativity, refuses tidy categorization. Death haunts these poems, whether it be a pigeon fatally dyed pink for a gender reveal party or a queer brutally murdered in a small Virginia town months before I moved there. As I metabolize the grief, rage, and despair resulting from past and current injustices, I turn to tender futurity: in this violent world, how can we—queers and accomplices—still cultivate pleasure and love?ETDenCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Internationalqueergaygender (reveal)bird/spinkcock/penis/dickbuttholepoetryhybridcumviolencebreeder/ingThesis