The Cairo Letters

Type Thesis

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Summary

My dissertation, The Cairo Letters , is a collection of poems that draws largely on the epistolary tradition. One section describes a series of letters I received from a first love living in Cairo, Egypt. They were long and lonesome and though I have the originals, the poems attempt to re-imagine what it felt like to receive these letters every day, while also telling the story of a dress shop owner in Cairo and her husband who lost his memory for six months after a car accident. The letters are intensely personal while also relating the most quotidian details of daily life and for this reason, for their engagement with present time, they become a metaphor for writing itself. Later sections take up the theme of forgetting, a type of disengagement or death, and the actual death of my father. In many ways this book is an elegy, making news of the private grief that is unforgettable and therefore universal.