Spinefruit Machine

This thesis is an investigation of innovative queer poetics. Using the sestina as a formal template, it deconstructs the lyric in order to explore a poetics of response, repurposing traditional poetic tools such as metaphor to instantiate a desire for difference. Drawing upon a wide range of theory from feminism, sexuality studies and translation theory to myrmecology, entomology, linguistics, and sound engineering, it is a long poem with roots in lyric and branches in pataphysics and conceptual poetics. In this “exploded sestina,” end-words take on the function of head-words (titles) and the poem is extended over 39 poems of differing length to form one long and incommensurable variation on the sestina.