Against Instructions

Author

• Latisha Turl, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

5-1-2026

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

Department

Creative Writing

First Advisor

Jordan, Judy

Abstract

Against Instructions is a poetry manuscript that examines inheritance as both a personal and systemic condition, tracing how violence, labor, class, and memory are passed through the body and across generations. Organized into four sections—Inheritance, Estate, Labor, and Layaway—the collection moves from childhood environments marked by instability and abuse, through the material realities of rural and working-class life, into service labor and its ethical tensions, and finally toward a reclamation of self, desire, and agency. Recurring images of fire, ash, houses, and the body as structure operate as central metaphors, allowing the manuscript to explore how damage persists and how it may be reworked. Formally, the collection employs a range of lyric strategies, including narrative fragmentation, extended metaphor, and varied lineation, to reflect the psychological and material conditions of its speaker. The poems resist simplification of rural, working-class, and queer experiences, instead presenting them as complex, contradictory, and shaped by broader economic and cultural systems. Ultimately, Against Instructions asks what it means to live in a body shaped by forces beyond one’s control and how, through refusal and attention, that body might be reclaimed. The manuscript concludes not with resolution, but with a shift from endurance to agency, suggesting that what remains after destruction may still hold the possibility for transformation.