ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst

Recent Submissions

  • Publication
    Spiders and Saints
    (2024-05) Zachar, Nathan
  • Publication
    Life Model
    (2024-05) Turkel, Scout
    Life Model is a collection of poems.
  • Publication
    Living While They Expect Us to Be Dead
    (2024-05) Thompson, Ide
    These poems are my attempts at the work of resurrection, attempts at reimagining the horrors that have existed, will exist, and are existing in my life and the lives of others. Pursuing an MFA has been both a privilege and a testing ground that has required me to go deeply into myself. The project for Living While they Expect Us to be Dead will be a polished draft of my MFA thesis. My awareness of anti-blackness and homophobia—intertwined experiences in my life between the Caribbean and the United States—is the impetus behind Living While they Expect Us to be Dead. Which is an examination of the ways in which the Black body and Black life have been relegated and transformed by the trauma of living in the wake of enslavement, anti-blackness, and homophobia in the Caribbean and the United States. I use the term Narrow Dark to describe these both singular and collective numerously complex experiences of Black subjection. The Narrow Dark is not only a poetic metaphor but also a descriptor of a psycho-social space that categorizes Blackness as a lived-in and pressurized existence. One that while seemingly without the hope of release, generates many ways of moving in, through, and out of this trauma. I define the generative power of the Narrow Dark with the term the Boundless Night to explore the ways the Black body and Black life “grow where not expected / use sight where imagined blind.” Growing up queer in The Bahamas and having to migrate for opportunity and safety has left me with a particularly visceral experience of nationality and identity. During the fellowship at Williams, I would sharpen the poems from Living While they Expect Us to be Dead into even more poignant examinations of Black Queer life in the wake of the Narrow Dark and the ways it blossoms in the Boundless Night.
  • Publication
    I-75, Other Routes
    (2024-05) Stallins, William
    This thesis is a poetic examination of Southern history and culture through explorations of the founding myths of the region. These myths include the family, Christianity and the Bible, Southern language and accent, music, the natural landscape, etc. Particularly, this thesis will try to poetically identify and undermine a destructive local brand of Whiteness in an every day, lived-in way. Finally, the thesis will try to raise up the bits of nuance here or there that I know from my own experiences to perhaps oer Southerners some new perspectives on the truths we take for granted.
  • Publication
    The God of Abandonment
    (2024-05) Rao, Shashank
    Nirvaan Rai, a young Indian revolutionary exiled in Japan, accompanies his friend and mentor, Purushottam Das, on a long holiday to the estate of the powerful Mizuhara family on the southern coast of Japanese-occupied Korea. There, he meets the estate’s steadfast manservant, Nam Jae-seong, who is searching for his missing sister. The two strike up a passionate affair over the course of their fateful summer, carving a space of tenderness for themselves in a world descending into chaos as the Second World War looms on the horizon.

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