Odalisques

Abstract

My senior honors thesis for the English department is a short booklet of poetry titled Odalisques. I've been very interested in the relationship of male heterosexual painters to their nude female subjects and the question of whether or not compassionate representations of women are possible in the overtly sexualized realm of the odalisque painting. I've also been attempting to bring some of Matisse's painting techniques into the structure and substance of the poems.