The Wrong Place

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Date

2018-01-04

Authors

Popeski, Jessica

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Publisher

University of Guelph

Abstract

This thesis is a regionally rooted, contrapuntal poetry cycle. I intend for it to unite my preoccupations with ecofeminist poetics and the genetic inheritance of fractured, grandmaternal generational lines, reconciling private and public conflicts by examining how political and geographical rupture, war zones, and genocide generate traumatic, ancestral memory. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans, my work will ask loud questions about why, for decades, depression has decorated the medical notes of my family, as if the ink stayed wet for a century, rubbing from one manila folder to the next. My project examines where these ancestral memories intersect, and manifest as cyclical bouts of anxiety and depression, physical illness, and disordered eating. By granting these recurring intergenerational cadences value in the present, my poems seek to transform stress, and the legacy of its gifts, into a greater consciousness. I hope my collection will join a canon of texts probing complicated cultural legacy, with an unchartered crispness in Canada.

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Keywords

Poetry, Epigenetics, Feminist poetics, Grandmaternal inheritance, Disordered eating, Concrete poetry, Anorexia

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