These Are Your Eyes Now: Poems

Abstract

This collection of poems features two separate but related projects, "Telescope City" and "Paint Can Can-Can." "Telescope City" is a speculative project focusing on high-powered ground telescopes as a place to call home, and what a life so intertwined with the cosmos might reveal about our own solitude. Similarly, "Paint Can Can-Can" explores the relationship between humanity and natural spaces, including our perception of our place in the universe. Additionally, this latter collection began as a generative exercise using the names of interior paint colors as poem titles, which offers a critical lens for thinking about how marketing and artifice encroaches on and appropriates elements that are “organic” or “natural.” A statement of poetics that explores the theories and inspirations of this collection follows.