Keywords

Poetry Hybrid Heritage DNA Creative Writing

Abstract

Immigrant Twists is a collection exploring the hunt for heritage, healing and the twists of DNA in poetic and hybrid forms. This collection is in four sections, each focusing on the evolving exploration and intersection between now and the past. "Adrift" introduces the reader to the quest to find heritage ("Instructions of Departure") and some of the early voices from my immigrant past, including a great grandmother who brings the family from Germany on a boat in 1928. The poems weave back and forth in time and voice, questioning gaps in family history and DNA, and lead the reader into the next two sections "The Storm" and "Migrations" to more revealed family history, voices, and trauma from the early immigrants of the 1600s, the Revolutionary War, and migrations from Ireland and Germany. "Witch Snippet" delves deep into early questions in a contrapuntal twist, and "Painting the Old Connecticut Path" becomes its own ekphrastic landscape of unfolding. We find Dot in "Dirigible" watching the last flight of the Hindenburg from the Chrysler Building, and later a voice from the fire that lost a generation of U.S. military records. The concluding section of "What We Find" includes poems of synthesis and connection, a healing among the stories and voices and a new definition of how language and place keeps evolving as our DNA.

Completion Date

2024

Semester

Spring

Committee Chair

Thaxton, Terry

Degree

Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

English

Degree Program

Creative Writing

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

DP0028315

URL

https://purls.library.ucf.edu/go/DP0028315

Language

English

Rights

In copyright

Release Date

May 2029

Length of Campus-only Access

5 years

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Campus-only Access)

Campus Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

Accessibility Status

Meets minimum standards for ETDs/HUTs

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Restricted to the UCF community until May 2029; it will then be open access.

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