ORCID

0009-0000-6777-6485

Keywords

Creative Writing, Poetry, Astrology, Metaphysics, Grief, Tarot

Abstract

If Your Muses Don’t Hate You… interrogates a speaker who feels she lacks the tools needed to properly assess trauma and grief. This collection follows the speaker as she delves into obsessive analysis of self, often using metaphysical lenses as methods of comprehension. Each section explores a facet of the subject’s identity, and examines whether her heartache is self-inflicted, preordained, or both. Six of the seven sections provide the reader with imaginative interpretations of the speaker’s natal chart, allowing the reader the opportunity to analyze alongside the speaker. The first half of these sections present the speaker struggling to separate her identity from her anguish, while the second half meditates on what ways her trauma has irreparably damaged or fundamentally changed past relationships, self-perception, and worldview. At times, the speaker is fearsomely grounded, unflinching in their willingness to confront past hurts or destructive behaviors. Other times, she dreamily imagines alternative lives, occasionally as far removed as prehistoric times, as a means of using speculation as an antidote to reality. The final section is presented as a tarot reading, microscopically picking at the edges of a specific relationship. This section serves to summarize the way the speaker manages and interprets past afflictions. Through the course of all seven sections, the speaker struggles to balance what she has the right to say, and what needs to be said to release her grief. In this way, the entire collection works to reshape poetry as the final tool needed by the speaker to work through her trauma, decisively concluding that everything is poetry.

Completion Date

2026

Semester

Spring

Committee Chair

Rochelle Hurt

Degree

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

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

Department of English

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Identifier

DP0053286

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