Department of English

Creative Thesis: Opera 2 is a collection of poems about loss—how memory, language, and material forms break down, reassemble, and resist containment. Blending text and image, the work doesn’t just describe disappearance; it enacts it, making reading an act of excavation, piecing together something that resists being held in place. Throughout, I return to the question of what remains—of a person, of an event, of an artwork—when its form is no longer intact. Underlying this interest in the breakdown of forms is the pathos of grief, namely, what remains in the face of disappearance. Ritual and endurance structure the collection, not as resolutions, but as ways of tracing absence. The handwritten elements of my collection function not only as fixed texts, but as artifacts of performance; proof of an attempt to hold something that cannot be fully retained. This performance is not an aesthetic spectacle, but a sustained, compulsive enactment. Words are crossed out, smudged, rewritten, their history visible on the page. Writing here is not simply produced but endured.. The process of creating here mirrors the way loss unfolds: not as a single event, but as a repeated reckoning. Opera 2 does not seek closure. Rather, it lingers in the detritus of what remains; the collection is the act of writing as both proof and failure. In the face of breakdown, Opera 2 finds both the violence and the beauty of what refuses to disappear.