How does an individual live in one’s body-what is one’s inner voice? How does an individual live in a society-how can one navigate within the society? These two questions impacted me as I attempted to gather the poems for my first book collection. The first part of my manuscript, The Book of Dee, attempts to ask this first of the above two questions: what is the inner voice? The Book of Dee is a series of inner utterings, almost half-whispers. It is as if a soul is in conversation with itself, as a soul asks itself: who am I, why am I here? This group of lyrical poems is intended to be read as a cohesive series, one long poem. The second part of my manuscript, Prison Tales, attempts to take a look outside of this inner- scape and ask: how does a human live in a larger world that assaults it, that imprisons it? In Prison Tales, I attempt to take lyrics of Mother Goose nursery rhymes into a prose-poetry format
