Given Poems

"This collection of poems, Given, represents the creative work I completed while at Syracuse University, from 1998-2001. The themes and styles vary, but can be said to explore confusions, anxieties and joys over gender, the body, ethnicity, and other elements of identity while employing a non-linearity that imitates dream logic. Morover, the poems are concerned with language itself, as both an abstract medium and a document of contemporary culture. The poems draw primarily from wordplay, personal experience, the detritus of everyday life, and the idiosyncracies of American movies, slang, folk songs, and other ephemera. In writing these poems, I was most influenced by other innovative contemporary American women poets, but I was also reading the New York School Poets of the 1950s and 1960s, and, as is reflected in the title of the collection, looking at Surrealist art."--Leaf[i].