Mapping Marceline. The first manuscript (Working Title, Mapping Marceline) centers on the name Marceline. I was named for my grandmother, who, in turn, was named for the early-20th-century actress Marceline Day. The manuscript is divided into different sections based on real and fictional Marcelines, ranging from 19th-century French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline Jones (wife of Jim Jones of Jonestown), to a villainess named Marceline in a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, as well as  Marceline the Vampire Queen from the cartoon Adventure Time. Each section is a series of persona poems. Forms include sonnet, blackout, elegy, epistolary, concrete poems, centos, and more. These are interspersed with surrealist poems of encounters between the Marcelines, as well as personal poems about my name.  

This manuscript is about, among other things, place, family, and our relationship with the natural world. In part, it is a story of my family’s immigration to the U.S., fleeing famine in Ireland and settling in Missouri. It is both a story of place and displacement and ruptures that reverberate through generations. This multigenerational story will trace the lives of six generations of women (and a few men) through archival research, books about my great-grandfather, a larger-than-life political boss, and will use a mix of persona poems, blackout, lyric, epistolary, odes, elegies, and sonnets to weave a portrait of hardship, trauma, and resiliency over nearly two centuries.