Abstract
The title poem of this thesis, “In This Strange Light,” exemplifies the main idea in this collection of poems—how friends carry each other through hardships and good times, giving support when they can and taking support when they need. These poems look at addiction, death, grief, love, and healing in the context of those friendships. Each section deals with a different theme. Section I: distance. Section II: the difficulty of naming. Section III: recovery. “Love Letter,” the first poem of the first section, finds the speaker struggling to name his loneliness. “I Woke Up Eating Donuts in the Rain,” the last poem of the final section, ends with the speaker looking outward, having finally moved through that loneliness. In between, a series of prose poems (the “Mary poems”) tells a story of addiction and friendship which ties the sections together. Overall, these poems look at what it means to be in relationship with others; they accept the uncertainty of those relationships by allowing themselves to be uncertain—hopefully leaving the reader with questions.