Abstract
Femme Pastiche is a hybrid poetry collection that raises narratives of violence beyond the categorically tragic through experimentations with form, voice, and queer poetics. I have chosen the title Femme Pastiche because I believe it represents the overall imitative qualities of these poems on femininity. Through intersecting series, it subverts what might be called “the women’s violence genre” by challenging the general heteronormativity of rape depictions through narratives of secondary trauma. There are poems about female serial killers, the aftermath of witnessing violence, the bureaucracy of rape, and the joy of femme expression. It uses documentary poetics, hybrid form, queer protagonism, and thematic violence, such as in “Synchysis for Aileen Wuornos,” to oppose patriarchal constraints, both cultural and literary. It evokes narratives of outsiders through hybrid forms, culminating in “The Hesiod Appendix,” which uses screenplay action and dialogue to revise the cult of heroism surrounding the ancient Greek poet, Hesiod. In Femme Pastiche, you will read the stories of many people who have been celebrated, villainized, or forgotten, asserted from by the question of why certain stories are told certain ways. It is the result of silence being undone.