Soma: body poems
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Abstract
Soma is chapbook-sized collection of lyric poems that explores themes of bodies, sexual and gender-based violence, metaphor, girlhood, materiality, post-humanist feminism, and the natural world. Through three overlapping poetic modes, referred to as a triple-stranded DNA helix, Soma’s figurative, material, and anatomical imagery comes together to create a portrait of a femme body, in pain yet healing. Soma’s figurative objectification, abstraction, and poetic anatomical analysis of the body offers a posthuman, new materialist, and ecofeminist lens through which other traumatized bodies may (re)situate themselves within the natural world. More importantly though, Soma is a reclamation of trauma, the traumatized body, and self-love. Following the short collection of personal poems is a critical analysis of Soma and a sources section which both offer context for the collection as well as insight into the author’s creative process and the secondary texts used in the creation of the collection.