Hold Me While We Burn

Type Thesis

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Summary

This collection of poetry, “Hold Me While We Burn,” centers on several facets of my identity as a queer woman raised in the southwest. Primarily, the project serves as a literary space where I vacillate between the most engaging and pleasurable aspects of queerness/lesbianism and the inherent danger of existing in the world as a woman and queer person. Threats—both the direct, obvious ones and the indirect, more concealed ones—enter my view and leave it in this collection just as they do in my daily life. Focusing solely on the challenging or otherwise-deemed “tragic” parts of queer identity is uninteresting and panders to the cisgender, heterosexual reader who desires to understand queerness and queer people through communal and personal trauma. It is essential, in my opinion, to bring in all aspects of my lived experience—happy or sad, frustrating or simple, beautiful or ugly. This also means I need to write through the privileges I have. As a white, able-bodied, cisgender, neurotypical, native-born (in the sense of not having immigrated to this country), able-to-afford-Flagstaff-and-graduate-school person, I am responsible for recognizing privilege in my work. The middle section of this manuscript seeks to take on the role my family history has played in my individual, present-day life but also in shaping the southwest as white occupiers, capitalists, and immigrants.