Lyric Blight: The Sobject Speaks, Sick as a Rose

This creative-critical dissertation comprises an essay on the feminine lyric speaker, a collection of lyric poems, and a poetics. “Lyric Blight: Sick Roses and the Sobject Speaker” examines a thread of lyric subjectivity in 20th and 21st century women’s poetry which embodies the alterity of the you while simultaneously speaking with the authority of the lyric I, constellating the speaker’s interiority within the transformative space of the lyric poem. Sick as a Rose Is, the collection of lyric poetry that follows, demonstrates such a speaker’s posture and voice as it considers the dearth of feminine interiority in the prescribed roles of the lyric relationship and interrogates the costly exchange of the feminine speaker-self for [fiscal, cultural] worth. As both poetry and the sick feminine body are not accommodated in the matrix of use-value, these poems explore and embody such blights. “How—Dashing,” a poetics on writing and re-membering the self through disability, celebrates the em-dash as a mode of radically non-linear, dis-abled discourse.