Pretend Her Genealogies

by Smith, Sarah Jane

This manuscript aims to complicate notions of being, identity, and selfhood by examining the possibilities of the poetic "I." While much of this work is autobiographical in nature, this manuscript proposes construction of selfhood as being not just a single line of uninterrupted self-narration, but a trajectory scored with various adopted and discarded identities. The ephemeral tone and abstracted content of this work are an attempt to explore the fluidity of identity and the nature of experience in the context of language. The "I" functions as not only the poem's speaker, but the focal point to a moment in time, a feeling, a realization, and the culmination of cultural and historical affects.