Shakemap

Tiffany L. Thomas
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:46:47 PDT

This thesis is a collection of confessional poetry, much of which takes the prose form. The purpose of this project is not only to parse the transgenerational trauma that exists between a mother and her daughters, but also to traverse the somatic landscape of memory in the wake of that mother's suicide attempt. As Mary Oliver states in her poem "The Uses of Sorrow": "Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift." Of the numerous poems in the collection that are concerned with the reckoning of this gift, many are Alaska placed-based, finding their foundations in the temperate, rain-rich Kodiak Island and in the changeable, subarctic Fairbanks. This project invites its readers to, in the tradition of Adrienne Rich, descend into a wreck of inherited grief to bury the myth of the mother and crawl back out again to begin living