The body and its name

Zeke Shomler
Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:46:38 PDT

This creative thesis, a book-length collection of poetry, explores gender, embodiment, personal history, queer identity, and the struggle to make meaning in a confusing and violent world. Organized into five sections, these poems frequently make use of a strong first-person lyric narrator to investigate queer/transgender selfhood within its greater context. In doing so, they address the difficulty of distinguishing between “self” and “other” through the use of borrowed language in centos, golden shovels, and erasure poems. This collection also takes a multimodal approach, integrating visual strategies including collage and the careful use of white space.