Year of Award
2012
Document Type
Thesis - Campus Access Only
Degree Type
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Degree Name
Creative Writing (Poetry)
Department or School/College
Department of English
Committee Chair
Greg Pape
Commitee Members
Christine Fiore, Christopher Comer, Joanna Klink
Keywords
abuse, abuse poems, bucolic, environmental poetry, fences, horse poems, horses, Mackenzie Cole, nature poetry, pastoral, poetry, trapping
Publisher
University of Montana
Abstract
The following collection of poems, Fences & Fault-lines, Deadfalls & Snares, attempts to chart the hierarchies mapped in the English language. Those in power–governments, churches, movements, militaries, businesses–manipulate our language to bait us, the threat of violence hanging overhead like a dead weight. Or their language holds us fast to a rock until we starve, or corrals us in so tight a space we attack those closest to us. Deadfalls. Snares. Fences. These are the voices used to entrap us. But deadfalls are no trap for those who know how they're set. Snares can be undone. And fences can be burned. Beyond, the fields open into ranges, bounded only where the rivers coil through canyons, where the ridge-lines wind past the edges of property. There–a language to rust the barbed wire. These poems seek that country.
Recommended Citation
Cole, Mackenzie, "Fences & Fault-lines, Deadfalls & Snares" (2012). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 440.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/440
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© Copyright 2012 Mackenzie Cole