Semester of Graduation
Spring 2025
Degree
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English
Document Type
Thesis
Abstract
The Fourth Longest Bridge is a body of poems about bridges, song, mourning, crafts, burial, mothers, Virginia's Eastern Shore, spiritual transmission, and bodies of water. The poems are non-linear, mostly inhabiting the ripe and difficult years between the speaker's present and her close friend's death almost a decade prior. She attempts to "disappear the distance" between herself and new places—recalibrating and transforming along the way—before returning to the homeland to lay her friend, finally, to rest.
Influenced by the writings of Gregory Orr, Lisa Russ Spaar, Jean Valentine, Maria Mercedes Carranza, Lucille Clifton, Alejandra Pizarnik, Idea Vilariño, and Claudia Emerson, Vansant is interested in writing as ritual, and writing to transcend elegy—memorial as well as metamorphosis. She is also invested in the animacy of landscapes, languages, and "invisible" forces, such as the heart's electromagnetic field, the tides, the capacity for a song to transport us, and time. All of these signals complicate and shape the speakers' desire to belong to her own life.
Date
4-14-2025
Recommended Citation
Vansant, Alejandra, "The Fourth Longest Bridge" (2025). LSU Master's Theses. 6109.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/6109
Committee Chair
Wheeler, Joshua