Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
First Advisor
Lee A Roripaugh
Abstract
Anatomy: The Book of Moose is a series of prose poems / flash creative non-fiction pieces all centered around body anxieties and health experiences. From the mildly curious to the truly terrifying, this project seeks to explore what it means to be healthy, what it means to be unwell, and the stress of constantly having to sort oneself into one of those two states. Originally conceived of as a poetic anatomy textbook, each piece in this collection focuses on one body part or experience. Through this framework, each piece becomes a self-contained entry in a memoir arranged tonally rather than chronologically. Following the work of Claudia Rankine, the prose blocks in each piece build both a narrative arc of storytelling and an interior emotional monologue. Written in the second person, this collection both empathizes with and interrogates the anxiety of wellness. This project draws on research into the mechanics of medical issues such as the Rabies virus, scholarship on health and experiences with the American medical system, and countless questions for a friend who is a medical professional, not to mention the requisite terrified Google searches on various maladies. Beyond these themes, a goal of this project was to challenge myself to tell my personal history directly and honestly. While this collection may not have bared every possible secret, it still required a level of truth and directness that pushed me into new spaces, writing that is both by myself and at myself, speaker subject and grammatical object at once. While this book may sit in an intersection of genres, there is enough of me in this collection that fiction is not one of them.
Subject Categories
Creative Writing
Keywords
non-fiction, poems
Number of Pages
96
Publisher
University of South Dakota
Recommended Citation
Nelson Levine, David, "Anatomy: The Book of Moose" (2024). Dissertations and Theses. 254.
https://red.library.usd.edu/diss-thesis/254