Drowning Boy

Abstract

The poems of Drowning Boy engage the world primarily through the frame of the domestic space, exploring the dynamics of familial and romantic relationships frequently from the confinement of a single room. In many of these poems, feelings of isolation prompt the speaker to interrogate the world in terms of the dramatics of the domestic or bounded space as set against a larger landscape--a landscape predominantly urban, but also, at times, pastoral or surreal. The domestic space also creates an occasion for the contemplation of the speaker's identity in the context of relationships both past and present. Additionally, the poems throughout the manuscript play with shifting perspectives and poetic modes-- perhaps as a means of breaking from the confinement of the singular room or singular poetic foothold.