Water's Work

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2015Water’s Work is a playful exploration of lyric poetry, etymology, and sound. The poems in this collection use repetition, often through off-rhyme, alliteration and consonance, to mimic the rhythm of water and its propelling but erosive force, which can be seen as analogous to language’s constructive and destructive potential. Water’s Work is both incidental autobiography and excited abstraction, which aims to showcase language’s failures as well as its affective force. “At Sea,” pours out a poetics of loss and discovery through citation, where identity is in a constant state of encoding, simultaneously one and many voices