Abstract
Winter, I Hope You Can Read This is a collection of poems exploring social nuances and overt cultural expectations in the Upper Midwest, specifically, Minnesota. The collection uses a reoccurring persona, Minnesota Child, to confront and celebrate the notions of community, risk, safety, exposure in gender roles, religion, and family. As a child and a girl, Minnesota Child pushes back against a culture that asks children and women to be seen, to hold places in a social structure, often removing agency in thought and action. She, and the collection of other voices within the community, state, and family, also willingly praise the things that they identify as limiting to their own agency. This collection asks the reader, people living within their own places, to reorient their preconceived notions, the stereotypes about a place and about people living within places that can often go over-looked or remain understood rooted in the stereotypes, long-held traditions, and cultural myths.