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Last week, I revisited the feedback that I had received on my workshop piece. I gained a lot of feedback that the poem resembled that of a spine. This led me to reflect on how I wanted to expand on and develop this workshop piece. I decided to make my final project a collection of poems that are shaped around the form of a human body. 

I have a complex relationship with my body, as most people do. On one extreme, I try to recognize that in many ways, my body is completely independent of who I am as a person. On the other hand, it is often difficult to separate my experiences from my body, considering that my physical form is the vessel through which I am able to interact with the world around me. With the original workshop piece that I wrote, I wanted to explore the idea that generational trauma, while inflicted by external events, is inherited by each new generation. I found this concept – of something abstract manifesting in physical ways via the human body – to be very interesting. I want each poem to be an exploration of my interactions with the world around me through my physical body and sensual experiences. I do recognize that this is a vague theme that will hopefully continue to take shape as I write and revise each poem. The shapes of the poems will come together to resemble an actual human body. I plan to incorporate code switching throughout, though I am unsure exactly how it will interplay with the meanings of the poems. This is another issue relating to form that I will need to continue thinking about. For now, I have pasted the first and third poems that I drafted that will be a part of this collection (the formatting got messed up on this platform but I attached an image to show how it is supposed to look): 

you cannot unsee                             what you have seen.

a child whose face is                      covered in a layer of dust 

her eyes are           closed as if            she is sleeping        but she is not

 red drips on                her forehead           red on whose             hands if not 

yours then whose? mine                          or yours, mine or ours

애 means love, 

나 means myself.

Image of Poems: