The imaginary age : poetry

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] My dissertation includes a critical introduction and a manuscript of poetry. The critical introduction, "There was no warm body in what you wrote": Redefining the Gurlesque via Patricia Lockwood's Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals' uses the contemporary poet Patricia Lockwood to argue for the expansion of Gurlesque poetics. First, I establish how Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg define the Gurlesque. Then, I demonstrate that Lockwood is a Gurlesque poet, and that her treatment of the body in various manifestations--the sexual body, the grotesque body, the traumatized body--complicates these poetics. I argue that while Glenum and Greenberg's conceptualization of the Gurlesque necessitates a transparent relationship between writing about the body and meaning about the body, Lockwood's poetry shows that writing about the body can generate meaning across, through, tangential, and aside from the body. Via the lens of the Gurlesque, then, Lockwood's poetry illuminates the multiple opportunities for meaning in women's body-writing. My manuscript of poetry, "The Imaginary Age,"� is divided into three parts, and might be described as a neo-confessional, gurlesque poetry that is especially invested in the bestiary and the elegy