How far gone

Graduation date: 2014Access permanently restricted to the OSU Community at author's request."How Far Gone" is a collection of poems that explores shifting boundaries through a fragmented narrative of vulnerability. Here, the lines between understanding and misinterpretation; between animal and human; between danger and contentedness; between desire and destruction; between the self and the other--they all slip, slide, and occasionally merge alongside the manuscript's various environments, themselves also constantly evolving underfoot. The narrative arc of "How Far Gone" follows a speaker who constantly finds herself (and often observes others) in liminal, vulnerable states. The multitude and persistence of these states point toward her own naiveté, toward power dynamics beyond her control, and also toward the violence and trauma of everyday life. The speaker in "How Far Gone" observes and bears witness to the other--whether a romantic partner, a stranger, a friend, an animal, or even her own body or memory--from a distance, and many poems point toward the notion that any attempt at empathy or connection with the other brings with it the risk of a less self-sustained, inherently less stable state of being. Though she is not allowed to forget or resolve this risk, the speaker does begin to make up the distance between herself and the other toward the end of the manuscript, eventually "ignoring impossibility" in order to realize a more immediate, hopeful world