Life without my head

This book of poems understands the human body as artifice, a device to broadcast and receive pain, even as it promises great pleasure. Here, this device is mostly female: a hyper-sexualized screensaver for a voyeuristic gaze, both flesh and holograph, sensual and synthetic, animated and automated, a dysmorphic image made to seem real. Inspired by a culture absorbed with alteration, alternate versions, and revisions, many of these poems are informed by less than literary sources, but sources that are fraught by their own revisionism and sense of disreality: tabloid magazines, internet pornography, film and television, even the warning labels on our household products. Here, women's bodies are reinvented via plastic surgery and remade by chemical, technological, and violent sexual transformation. Their bodies are powered-up even when appearing dead. Questions of power permeate many of these poems: who is in charge of the body on the table? On the screen? Is violence acted on a machine less animal? The variety of forms these poems take (off-kilter tercets, rambling lines of ghazals, stark monosticks, etc.) are physical bodies in and of themselves, aiming to mirror their content in both shape and suggestion. Many poems explore how the language of the body and the language of technology intersect in humorous and disturbing ways, since the gods of technology have co-opted the body to insinuate their way into every nook and make their own artifice appear natural. Despite the often playful nature of the language (rhyme, wordplay) these poems emit a painful broadcast. Real bodies do experience sex as rape, and they do undergo bloody, perfection-seeking surgeries; real bodies do dance ugly with drugs and death, and we are compelled to watch. There is a Jerry Springer sensibility at work in many of these poems: audience aware and aiming for the jugular. The body is always a talk show. iv

Name thesis:degree_name

M.F.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Creative Writing and Media Arts (UMKC)

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Missouri--Kansas City

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Abernathy, Piper Lynn

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bar-Nadav, Hadara

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10355/10786

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:mospace.umsystem.edu:10355/10786