Roth, Laura, authorSteensen, Sasha, advisorBeachy-Quick, Dan, committee memberOsborn, Erika, committee member2024-05-272026-05-202024https://hdl.handle.net/10217/238421Fittingly, the first seed of Terminator is rooted in an ending. Before I knew "terminator" as the line of separation between the illuminated and unilluminated parts of the Earth, before I knew that I wanted to pursue an MFA in writing, I found myself split by the sudden loss of the hearing in my left ear and the resulting onset of my chronic tinnitus. This event, which took place years prior to any inkling of these poems, feels like an important place to begin. Unexpected and inexplicable, partial deafness was a "little-a apocalypse," one that revealed much to me about the subjectivity of perception, the body's volatility, and my own mortality. Perhaps this is why when, in the first semester of my master's degree, I stumbled upon the astronomical definition of a "terminator," a shock of recognition bolted through me. Like a planet, my body understood what it was to exist continuously in the space between two different qualities of light, what it was to live past the boundary of my reality. Though I didn't immediately latch onto the "terminator" as the structuring metaphor of my thesis, the poems I wrote for workshop naturally grew out of questions about the gray areas within my own being— between self and other, subject and object, subconscious mind and waking mind, human and more-than-human. These concerns are reflected not only in the content of my poems but also in their formal experimentation, which often approaches the page as an illustrative canvas where the black text can flow into organic shapes or trace stark boundaries. For the permission to be explorative in my composition, I am indebted to Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" and Lyn Hejinian's "The Rejection of Closure" as well as the countless poets who have laid their own foundations in "field poetics." Through the reading I've done in this program, my concept of the "terminator" has also taken on more sociopolitical dimensions. In particular, the pre-Socratic philosophers, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Prismatic Ecology, Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects, and the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty have helped me to see this project as a lens through which to think about human induced climate change and all the "endings" (and beginnings) it entails. At the same time, Terminator continues to be extremely personal to me. During my third semester of the program, my own world ended and renewed once more as I came into my queerness, a shift that continues to transform my close relationships, my embodiment, my value system, my orientation to the past and the future, my creative ethos. Affirming my gender and sexuality after a lifetime of suppressing them has opened fresh inquiry into my "shadow selves"— what parts of my identity do I allow myself and others to perceive? What parts are concealed? How are these unilluminated aspects of myself stored in the body? Once again, the terminator has come to represent an internal boundary for me, between who I believed myself to be and who I am becoming. As a result of these changes, I have had to reconsider how to situate myself in my world and, therefore, in my poems. In the past year, my poetic practice has expanded to encompass more intuitive and playful components, ones that honor pieces of myself that I'm not fully conscious of. When I find language by drawing words from a bowl, performing an erasure, or making a kind of "mad lib" out of a poem's syntactic structure, I am often surprised by my own instinctual knowing. "Origin of Blue," "Frequency," and "Worries" are all examples of poems that have emerged from these kinds of procedures. Despite the progress I've made, what you'll find in this manuscript is, as of yet, incomplete. As a recovering perfectionist, that's something I'm proud of. I'm excited to continue learning on the "terminator," to continue realizing some of the themes that interlace through this collection. In the immediate future, I plan to travel to Cleveland, Ohio in order to witness the last total solar eclipse that will pass through this part of the world during our lifetimes. I can't say exactly what will come out of this experience, though I admit I'm nursing a poem— a long one, perhaps bound by formal or temporal constraints (thinking about Alice Oswald's "Tithonus: 46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn"), that might divide this collection down its center. That would seem very right to me. My hope is that Terminator can offer a space where macrocosm and microcosm intersect. Like the Fibonacci spiral, which represents at once a seashell and the shape of our galaxy, I intend for this collection to touch deeply human concerns and deepen them still by contextualizing them within the reality that we live in a universe, a universe that moves in cycles that are both predictable and beyond comprehension. Humans have invented all sorts of explanations for our improbable existence— mythologies, religions, political regimes. No matter how advanced our technology or grandiose our scripture, all the intricacies of human and non-human life are conditional on something entirely out of our control: a cosmic agency that brings both light and dark, summer and winter to the face of this planet. We don't get to choose when or how the sun rises and sets. We don't get to choose our bodies, how they change, how they age, how they die. And maybe that's a good thing. It might be the one experience that we all have in common.born digitalmasters thesesengCopyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright.TextEmbargo expires: 05/20/2026.