Beautiful, Or Only Strange

Abstract

Beginning with a poem that expresses a desire to return to a pre-birth existence and continuing on through poems that explore the sometimes discrete, sometimes simultaneous experiences of joy, pain, and absurdity of life, this collection of poetry attempts to understand the world as a place that is at any moment both beautiful and terrifying, infinitely ordered and chaotic, boring and strange. In these poems I attempt to name paradoxes by intermixing scientific and emotional circumstances, love and disgust, despair and optimism, helplessness and power. Most of the poems are uncomplicated in language, syntax, and form in order to allow the mysteries of these subjects themselves to be the focus, and to offer an understandable framework for the incomprehensible.