Collapse: Language, Real Estate, Material Culture, and the Poetics of Interior Space

Collapse is a poetry manuscript that explores place and identity, space and confinement, socioeconomic conditions, family structures, gender roles, natural disasters, building, re-building, and collapse, all against the backdrop of the recent housing boom and subsequent crash. The poems acknowledge the importance of place in shaping our experience and grapple with our complex relationship to and love affair with our homes, both celebrating and challenging the connection between home ownership and the American Dream. Collapse inhabits a shifting landscape of housing markets and neighborhoods across the country, but always hinges on the domestic sphere, on the internal spaces that focus our perception, shape our perspective, and inform our sense of identity. The critical component of the dissertation investigates Harryette Mullen's poetry and its relationship to and revisions of lyric and experimental traditions, analyzing Mullen's exploration and critique of the language and objects of consumerism in S*PeRM**K*T. This exploration arises from an interest in how Mullen's use of borrowed language and forms relates to the language of real estate in my own work