Something mortal I could fall upon

Graduation date: 2011Access restricted to the OSU Community at author's request from June 14, 2011 - June 14, 2016Something Mortal I Could Fall Upon is a collection of poetry exploring geographical, emotional, and cerebral permutations of home. These poems ask: What is home? What does it mean to give up a place? How does, or can, one rebuild the home? Although it is clear the speaker loves the landscape of her childhood and feels loyalty to her family, the poems quickly problematize home as the speaker reveals memories of family members' addiction, recounts abandonment, and describes feeling separate or outcast from the family. Throughout the manuscript, emotional wars play out between devotion to the family/landscape and disgust of the unpleasant realities of home. Trying to reconcile conflicting feelings, the speaker looks to the natural world and to society/the industrial, plumbs years of memories, and peers into the lives of historical, yet similarly distraught figures. The only definitive acts become the process of seeking answers and the understanding that though home may be imperfect, it is still undeniably longed for and ultimately inescapable