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Abstract
Nature, seen with a desperate, urban eye, shapes this work. The kind of nature that informs these poems is nature under attack. These poems open a door between the domestic and the wild, and, sometimes violently, between the interior of the body and the natural world. In this manuscript, the poems move quickly, as if the world is disappearing faster than I can write it. Scarcity and drought dictate the poems' forms while a hoped-for abundance forwards their momentum---sometimes making for very short lines and desolate white space, sometimes disrupting meter and rhyme scheme in sonnets and invented form, and often creating dislocations in voice and syntax.
At the end of the book, these formal considerations turn toward considerations of disciplinary modes in which I use scientific texts to connect physical phenomena with figurative image, letting the methodology of each discipline inform the other. In the last poem, I incorporate Darwin's language from Origin of the Species into an extended lyrical musing about origin and destiny. By situating lexical play, narrative speculation, and disruptive image inside an already established rubric, I relate my non-scientific interpretations of nature with Darwin's very scientific ones.
