The Ossuaries

The Ossuaries is a collection of sixteen poems conceptualized around the ancient Greek funerary practice of placing the bones of the dead in an ossuary with scholarly analysis. This thesis is an exploration of the author's family history and a meditation on funerary practice, social history, photography and distance. The author works heavily with an archive of family photographs dating back to 1900. In the pattern of investigative and documentary poetics, poems incorporate photographs, legal documents, interviews, and genealogical research. The collection is titled after a series of five poems, each about an individual relative, assembled from fragments of information gathered during research and articulated into poetry.