Darkroom (Brittingham Prize in Poetry)

In the aftermath of her mother's suicide, one young woman recognizes the malleability of her reality. From her adolescence in the flat, hot Floridian landscape to a tectonic Missouri adulthood, a girl shaped by grief is compelled to create and manipulate her image of the world. As her dreams become indistinguishable from daily life, she begins to question memory, identity, and the function of love.

Employing photography as its central metaphor, Darkroom tackles the tangled relationship between memory and mourning by exploring an artist's impossible attempt to re-create the object of loss.