Date of Award
Spring 5-1-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Art (M.F.A.)
Department
English
Language
English
First Advisor
Timmy Straw
Abstract
A collection of poetry.
Preface: In the spring of 2022 I lived in Bethnal Green, a once working-class neighborhood in East London. I grew attached to the area as it gave me a life I couldn’t have back in Florida. Everything needed to subsist was contained within walking distance. My connection to the place grew strong each time I walked through Middleton Green or passed Keeling House rising up out of the fog as I made my way to work. Gradually, I developed a sense of isolation, smelling the salt from the gulf, an ocean that wasn’t there. The threat of natural disaster had grown faint in the idyllic, largely pasteurized place I was living. I’d watched the Niger River floods since June and by September, Hurricane Ian destroyed much of my hometown and almost all of Fort Myers Beach, erasing monuments and topographical markers that had always been there, making the familiar landscape completely estranged from me a second time. First through the passage of time and distance, and then through the phenomena of weather reclaiming the land. In physics, the Coriolis Effect causes wind rushing toward the low-pressure of the storm eye to veer, producing the rotation. It is a pseudo-force that acts on objects in motion within a frame of reference that rotates with respect to an inertial frame. This effect makes things like hurricanes and planes appear to travel long distances at a curve as opposed to a straight line. The poem takes its first thread from a weather event that is acted on by the Coriolis Effect and works to produce a fictitious force of energy, a nervousness and deflective knowledge burrowed in the sculpted language, as well as the community of speech that exists in Fort Myers, or did, at least when I lived there. It attempts to weave a patchwork that is strongly suggestive of environmental devastation, particularly the hurricane. Whether this group of work correlates to the experience of dislocation it aims for, I don’t know, but there is a gravity of particles pulling it together.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Chase, Shane, "Tropical Hardware" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/bc_etds/22
