Let light eat the spine and Speaker for bones

Abstract

My multi-part thesis, Let Light Eat the Spine and Speaker for Bones, reflect different methods of creating lyric corporality and different manifestations of my concern with vulnerability. The poetry portion considers the body as a site of connection between chronic illness and the Anthropocene, using poetry's sonic and imagistic qualities to produce a bodily response in the reader that's an alternative to the harmful language of the contract and the law. It is one book-length poem made of several smaller poems, a body of text tearing itself apart. By contrast, the creative nonfiction portion explores a constellation of concerns around gaze and bodily exposure in several stand-alone essays. Both manuscripts center a body-driven ecopoetics of thought and feeling.