I think of this book as having two presiding spirits: the concept of “strange strangeness” formulated by Timothy Morton in The Ecological Thought and anticipated, in my eyes, by Julia Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves; and the concept of “feeling real,” specifically as presented in D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality. The poems that make up A Season are caught between these two poles, such as they are, doing their best to make a life within the limbo into which they’ve fallen. The poems live in strangeness, within which they want to feel real; their drive is to reweave an intimacy between the past and the present, the “self” and its others, between the world that is and a world that’s been irrevocably lost. The project takes as its genesis a moment of crisis in which Narcissus leans over the pool and sees no reflection there. Its methods are collage, “translation,” and assemblage as “re-membrance,” and by the end I think what it aims for is the patchwork reconstruction of a face, a face in which the many sub-faces that make up any face are lovingly held up for display. A Season is a self-portrait as blank space, a self-portrait as perpetual becoming—“a house of mirrors in which every face is perpetually on its way.”
","abstract_html":"<p>I think of this book as having two presiding spirits: the concept of “strange strangeness” formulated by Timothy Morton in <em>The Ecological Thought</em> and anticipated, in my eyes, by Julia Kristeva in <em>Strangers to Ourselves</em>; and the concept of “feeling real,” specifically as presented in D.W. Winnicott’s <em>Playing and Reality</em>. The poems that make up A Season are caught between these two poles, such as they are, doing their best to make a life within the limbo into which they’ve fallen. The poems live in strangeness, within which they want to feel real; their drive is to reweave an intimacy between the past and the present, the “self” and its others, between the world that is and a world that’s been irrevocably lost. The project takes as its genesis a moment of crisis in which Narcissus leans over the pool and sees no reflection there. Its methods are collage, “translation,” and assemblage as “re-membrance,” and by the end I think what it aims for is the patchwork reconstruction of a face, a face in which the many sub-faces that make up any face are lovingly held up for display. A Season is a self-portrait as blank space, a self-portrait as perpetual becoming—“a house of mirrors in which every face is perpetually on its way.”</p>","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Walsh, Michael Joseph"],"institution":null,"degree_name":"Ph.D.","degree_level":"Dissertation","degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Graham Foust"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2018,"date_issued":"2018-06-01T07:00:00Z","date_published":"2018-06-01T07:00:00Z","updated_at":"2026-07-24T02:01:25Z","subjects":["Creative writing","Poetry","Arts and Humanities"],"languages":["en"],"rights":["Copyright is held by the author. This work may only be accessed by members of the University of Denver community. The work is provided by permission of the author for individual research purposes only and may not be further copied or distributed. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
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"],"dc:subject":["Creative writing","Poetry","Arts and Humanities"],"dc:title":["A Season"],"thesis:degree_level":["Dissertation"],"thesis:degree_name":["Ph.D."]},"updated_at":"2026-07-24T02:01:25Z"}