(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Dempsey, Sunshine, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Dicesare, Catherine, committee member
What barbarous is primarily concerned with, as a book of poetry, is a formal representation of the disintegration and recreation of the speaker’s psyche. A more stable identity, that with which the speaker begins the manuscript, is represented by a more stable form, that of the prose block, which will gradually evolve into a more “fractured” structure, that of the “spatial” or “field” work. This hybridization of form is deliberate in that it should most aptly capture the disorientation of identity, the “breakage” that occurs to the speaker when he/she loses (and attempts to regain) a sense of “wholeness.” In this manuscript, the loss of identity is also represented metaphorically by an inability to speak, or to be understood. This loss of voice is a displacement to the speaker, and is therefore furthered by fracture and negative space. When there is no voice, there is no language, no written word, and therefore the silence of the empty page.
