In order to graduate from my poetry MFA I wrote a thesis. This was basically all the poems I liked that I wrote during my time here and I put them all together and spent a lot of time thinking about the order and then edited them with the help of professors and friends.

The thesis is called "Default Country" (thank you to Jessica Laser who suggested that title during her master class). It was going to be "The Default Country" but at the last minute before submitting it, using the workshop office white-out (which is what Tipp-ex is called in America, "white-out", and if you ask for Tipp-ex they look at you like you're crazy), I decided to drop the 'the' because it was cleaner. (This is a reference to the movie The Social Network)

I didn't use an epigraph but I did consider the following Julia Child quote: "How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like kleenex?"