My thesis is a manuscript of poetry that I began in my poetry classes with artist in residence Doug Goetsch in the MFA program in creative writing. The principal theme of this collection is manhood: adolescent males becoming young men; young men dealing with love and sex; young men becoming fathers and husbands; fathers and husbands dealing with children and wives; grown men and their careers; men dealing with death; and men as witnesses of the world beyond their homes. The poems are all free-verse, most having short to average length lines, and most having irregular stanzas rather than a fixed lines-per-stanza, and most were written in the first person. My most profound influences include Douglas Goetsch, Tony Hoagland, Philip Levine, Tony Gloeggler, Stephen Dunn, Russell Edson, Billy Collins, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Randall Jarrell, Doug Dorph, Sharon Olds, Gary Soto and David Kirby. Most of my poems are realistic, but a few drift into the absurd. All deal with issues of concern to almost any individual, especially the average man: falling in love, getting older, supporting a family, losing loved ones, meeting your neighbors, dying. Most of my poems explore these issues through narrative and description rather than through philosophical discussion. As my collection is not a continuous narrative, they are linked thematically.