This dissertation is a collection of lyric poems, Surety, accompanied by a critical essay on Barbara Guest. Surety gives voice to a cerebral speaker who inhabits, navigates, and traverses various domestic spaces, while also attending to the landscape and politics of rural Iowa. Its poems move by recursion and repetition, corrupt linear time, and contend with trauma-related ruptures of chronology and space. Grounded in my memory of living in Iowa in 2015, a year that brought political textures and ecological tensions to the surface of daily life in a small-town community, Surety takes a calendar year as an experiential and self-archival frame.
The critical preface claims Barbara Guest as an exemplary practitioner of the kind of lyric thinking enacted in Surety and informed by her triangulation of the writerly I, the lyric you, and the reader, who by turns witnesses and participates in the language (what Guest calls the orchid position). This dissertation creatively performs and critically examines the affective dimensions of this kind of lyric movement: how impressions— poetic hauntings—become a place, and how correspondences between I and you inform and direct readerly inhabitation of the poem.
","abstract_html":"<p>This dissertation is a collection of lyric poems, <em>Surety</em>, accompanied by a critical essay on Barbara Guest. <em>Surety</em> gives voice to a cerebral speaker who inhabits, navigates, and traverses various domestic spaces, while also attending to the landscape and politics of rural Iowa. Its poems move by recursion and repetition, corrupt linear time, and contend with trauma-related ruptures of chronology and space. Grounded in my memory of living in Iowa in 2015, a year that brought political textures and ecological tensions to the surface of daily life in a small-town community, <em>Surety</em> takes a calendar year as an experiential and self-archival frame.</p> <p>The critical preface claims Barbara Guest as an exemplary practitioner of the kind of lyric thinking enacted in <em>Surety</em> and informed by her triangulation of the writerly <em>I</em>, the lyric <em>you</em>, and the reader, who by turns witnesses and participates in the language (what Guest calls the <em>orchid position</em>). This dissertation creatively performs and critically examines the affective dimensions of this kind of lyric movement: how impressions— poetic hauntings—become a place, and how correspondences between <em>I</em> and <em>you</em> inform and direct readerly inhabitation of the poem.</p>","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Zumbahlen, Anna"],"institution":null,"degree_name":"Ph.D.","degree_level":"Dissertation","degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Graham Foust","R. D. Perry","Lindsay Turner","Jennifer Pap"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2023,"date_issued":"2023-01-01T08:00:00Z","date_published":"2023-01-01T08:00:00Z","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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The critical preface claims Barbara Guest as an exemplary practitioner of the kind of lyric thinking enacted in Surety and informed by her triangulation of the writerly I, the lyric you, and the reader, who by turns witnesses and participates in the language (what Guest calls the orchid position). This dissertation creatively performs and critically examines the affective dimensions of this kind of lyric movement: how impressions— poetic hauntings—become a place, and how correspondences between I and you inform and direct readerly inhabitation of the poem.
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The critical preface claims Barbara Guest as an exemplary practitioner of the kind of lyric thinking enacted in Surety and informed by her triangulation of the writerly I, the lyric you, and the reader, who by turns witnesses and participates in the language (what Guest calls the orchid position). This dissertation creatively performs and critically examines the affective dimensions of this kind of lyric movement: how impressions— poetic hauntings—become a place, and how correspondences between I and you inform and direct readerly inhabitation of the poem.
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"],"dc:subject":["Creative writing","Poetry","Arts and Humanities"],"dc:title":["Surety"],"thesis:degree_level":["Dissertation"],"thesis:degree_name":["Ph.D."]},"updated_at":"2026-07-24T02:01:25Z"}