Scratching the Ghost

abstract: The poems in this book are lyric, meditational, and narrative approaches to autobiographical tales. These works, through various poetic forms, are an attempt to assess and equate personal life experiences with those larger human and universal occasions. Spanning both physical time (a cross-country move from Virginia to Arizona) and spatial time (Virginia and Mississippi during the civil rights movement), the works evaluate and validate the human experiences of loss. Through poems addressed to various family members and historical figures, the book attempts to terms with the often humorous, often terrifying experience of being an African American male in the United States in the 21st Century.Dissertation/ThesisM.F.A. Creative Writing 201