Mouth Stuff

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the idea of nuance in culturally oversimplified narratives, including fraught paternal relationships, sexual assault and non-consent dynamics, childhood and young adulthood LGBTQ+ experiences, and everyday life and mental health in the climate crisis. Drawing upon the 20th century tradition of short poetry and minimalism, this thesis attempts to demonstrate the frustration of post-internet media culture’s fixation on providing a complete account of a complex issue in extremely limited linguistic space. This collection narratively demonstrates a night of insomnia, loneliness, and depression from sunset to sunrise as the speaker recalls various memories from their life. In using the linguistic limitation and relatable mental-health framing device, and in arranging poems such that no topic is continuously subject to reflection without interruption, it also seeks to address questions of the role of reader-attentiveness in the cultural limitation of rhetorical narratives and the way this impacts the nature of poetry itself