Somehow Holier ruminates playfully on the problem of suffering and our responses to it. These poems take as their subjects theology, history, art, my wife's struggle with chronic migraines, and gardening. "Res Gestae Variorum," a crown of sonnets at the center of the book, recounts the lives of would-be Christian saints, like the third-century theologian Origen, whose penchant for suffering obstructed them on the path to holiness. In "Mater Misericordiae" I flip through a calendar filled with famous depictions of Mary while my wife consults with a doctor. These poems blend humor and pathos, striving at once to laugh in the face of pain and account for its awful cost. Throughout, I'm in conversation with the poets who've influenced my voice as a writer: Charles Wright, Phillip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney.

The early modern English masque is a hybrid form of entertainment that included music, dance, poetry, and visual spectacle, and for which there is no modern equivalent. This dissertation looks at four incarnations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masque: the court masque, the masque embedded in the progress entertainment, the masque embedded in the commercial play, and the masque embedded in the commercial play performed at court. This study treats masques as a form of elite theatre (that is, theatre for, by, and about elite figures like monarchs and aristocrats) and follows them from the court to the countryside, through the commercial playhouse, and back again to the court in pursuit of a more nuanced picture of the hybridity and flexibility of early modern English performance culture.