Grad Research: Julie Kantor's Poetry Featured in Boston Review

Exciting news from our graduate community: Julie Kantor has just published a series of poems in the latest issue of The Boston Review. We asked Julie about her work; here's what she had to say:

The sampler of poems appearing in the current issue of The Boston Review is a selection from my first collection of poems, The Beautiful West. The voice of these poems is searching for a way to speak to the marks left on the self by the self and others without resorting to the silence, or madness, so often a result of loss. Without even realizing, I reached back into Ancient Egyptian culture--their contributions to quotidian life in conjunction with the ornate rituals and traditions related to death--to intertwine it with modern life, the separation between blurred into one long existence; the way we allow ourselves to be tortured for love, to accept another's pain as our own, to hurt those we love to remain unchanged in the righteousness of our wronging is nothing new.While I keep my art, and my process to myself--separate and safe from influence--my commitment to invention through connection in my writing is what lead me to American Studies. Though I don't often let the two sides run on the same reel, they are concurrent; a mind can be ignored, but not gotten away from.

You can read the full collection here.For more about American Studies at UT, subscribe to our newsletter here.