Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List

Full text of this paper is not available in the ETD Center. Copies may be available for inter-library loan from Bowling Green State University or may be available for purchase from Proquest/UMI

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Stellar Autopsy

Nichols, Casey M
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1395100975

Abstract Details

2014, Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, Creative Writing/Poetry.
Stellar Autopsy is a collection of original poetry that considers the relationship between loss and memory. The poems in this manuscript use landscape to compose elegies for childhood and family, lost time, and the self. In blending narrative voices and lyric moments, the speaker in section one embodies the chaos of grief, the wandering and dislocated sense of being lost after a loss. Bodies and relationships break. Landscapes are varied, strange, and quietly threatening. Often, poems are resigned to the knowledge that time is fleeting, and relationships, whether damaged or brilliantly meaningful, all have an inevitable end. Gradually, the speaker uses violence and fractured syntax to soothe suffering and to ground the body in a place. In section two, the speaker begins to see omens of fertility, to look to the sky for direction, and exercise reason and judgment. Though a resolution is only initiated, landscape remains the instrument by which the speaker approaches examining her relationships. It is this examination that resembles the stellar autopsy—the raw data scientists use to compose the music, or the elegy, of a star’s final moments. In their dying, stars fertilize the universe. Planets could not sustain without carbon from dying stars. It is the hope in this kind of departure, the life beyond valediction, that readers consider throughout this collection.
Larissa Szporluk (Committee Chair)
Sharona Muir (Committee Member)
40 p.
Fine Arts; Language; Literature
poetry; lyric poetry; persona poetry; landscape poetry; pastoral; prose poetry

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Nichols, C. M. (2014). Stellar Autopsy [Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1395100975

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Nichols, Casey. Stellar Autopsy. 2014. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1395100975.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Nichols, Casey. "Stellar Autopsy." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1395100975

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

bgsu1395100975