The Language of Flowers Is in Much Disrepair

"The Language of Flowers Is in Much Disrepair" is a collection of poems that seeks to explore the lyric’s possibilities for both locating and effacing the liberal subject in contemporary language. The poems in each of the three sections of this collection work toward the lyric by frustrating causality and narrative linearity, and counterbalance the sense of dislocation by foregrounding musicality in descriptive language. This dissertation is committed to facilitating the imaginative appearance of the gestural as a prelingustic biological force, or movement, within the larger whole of the lyric genre. The manuscript’s embodying of the gestural through the medium of the lyric poem is informed in part by descriptive language in scientific research, mechanical assembly manuals, and literatures of the ecstatic.