Year of Award

2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Degree Name

Creative Writing (Poetry)

Department or School/College

English

Committee Chair

Sean Hill

Committee Co-chair

Brian Blanchfield

Commitee Members

Julia Galloway

Publisher

University of Montana

Subject Categories

Poetry

Abstract

With broad lyric range, the ecopoems in Green center around the ideology and ethics of the American West. The speaker’s position within that as a descendent of settler laborers is interrogated, as well as language itself. Grammar is used as a tool to perform deconstructive work, examining how labor intersects with colonialism and climate change. Melding intellectual analyses of etymology with the physical act of agricultural labor, these poems range from the conversational and playful to lyric explorations of loss.

Interwoven with this is the speaker’s self-examination of femininity and matrilinear inheritance. How do we use the language we’ve been given to define ourselves, and our understanding of place? The ways we talk about land as a resource, home, and inspiration are considered through multiple lenses, such as science, regional flower guides, familial lore, and workday conversation. In the middle section, grief is treated similarly, by using elements like mythology, birds, and American chain hotels to ask, what is left in the wake of loss? In both cases, the poems here build a taxonomy of what is left behind—in the wake of colonialism, familial inheritance, loss, and ecogrief—and how we love the world in spite of it.

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Poetry Commons

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© Copyright 2024 Lillian I. Emerick Valentine