This book offers the first sustained study of the ways 21st century North American poems engage with financialization. It argues that recent poems about economics not only discuss but enact concerns with containment and agency essential to the contemporary financialized economy by manipulating the seemingly old-fashioned figures of synecdoche (the representation of the whole by the part) and prosopopeia or personification. Its four body chapters offer in-depth readings of the work of eleven formally, culturally, and thematically diverse contemporary U.S. and Canadian poets who variously consider labor, consumerism, debt, and the derivative form; the Coda reads several recent poems about reparations in terms of an emerging tendency to emphasize the historical, racialized, and ethical contexts of contemporary economics. As the book explores financialization’s representation in recent poetry, it redresses arguments that poetry is irrelevant to contemporary culture.

Overheard Voices examines poetic address and in particular apostrophe (the address of absent or inanimate others) in the work of four post-World War II American poets, with a focus on loss, desire, figuration, audience, and subjectivity. By approaching these crucial issues from an unexpected angle--through a study of the seldom-examined lyric "you"--Overheard Voices offers new insight into both contemporary lyric and the lyric genre more generally. The book offers detailed readings of Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, Louise Gluck, and Frank Bidart.

This anthology of poetry collects 21st century American works by both established and emerging poets that deal with the public events, government policies, ecological and political threats, economic uncertainties, and large-scale violence that have largely defined the century to date. But these 138 poems by 50 poets do not simply describe, lament, or bear witness to contemporary events; they also explore the linguistic, temporal, and imaginative problems involved in doing so. In this way, the anthology offers a comprehensive look at contemporary American poetry, demonstrating that poets are moving at once toward a new engagement with public concerns and toward a focus on the problems of representation. A detailed introduction by the editors along with poetics statements by many of the poets add depth and context to a book that will appeal to anyone interested in the state and evolution of contemporary American poetry.

Drawing on trauma theory, genre theory, political theory, and theories of post-modernity, space, and temporality, 'Literature after 9/11' suggests ways that these often distinct discourses can be recombined and set into dialogue with one another as it explores 9/11's effects on literature and literature's attempts to convey 9/11.

Drawing on trauma theory, genre theory, political theory, and theories of post-modernity, space, and temporality, Literature after 9/11 suggests ways that these often distinct discourses can be recombined and set into dialogue with one another as it explores 9/11's effects on literature and literature's attempts to convey 9/11.

"Overheard Voices" examines poetic address and in particular apostrophe (the address of absent or inanimate others) in the work of four post-World War II American poets, with a focus on loss, desire, figuration, audience, and subjectivity. By approaching these crucial issues from an unexpected angle--through a study of the seldom-examined lyric "you"--"Overheard Voices" offers new insight into both contemporary lyric and the lyric genre more generally. The book offers detailed readings of Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, Louise Gluck, and Frank Bidart.

The News from Poems examines a subgenre of recent American poetrythat closely engages with contemporary political and social issues. This"engaged" poetry features a range of aesthetics and focuses on publictopics from climate change to the aftermath of recent wars in Afghanistanand Iraq to the increasing corporatization of U.S. culture. The News from Poems brings together newly commissioned essays byeminent poets and scholars of poetry and serves as a companion volumeto an earlier anthology of engaged poetry compiled by the editors. Essaysby Bob Perelman, Steven Gould Axelrod, Tony Hoagland, Eleanor Wilner,and others reveal how recent poetry has redefined our ideas of politics,authorship, identity, and poetics. The volume showcases the diversity of contemporary American poetry,discussing mainstream and experimental poets, including some whosework has sparked significant controversy. These and other poets of ourtime, the volume suggests, are engaged not only with public events andtopics but also with new ways of imagining subjectivity, otherness, andpoetry itself.

The present era of economic devastation, legacies of colonization and imperialism, climate change and habitat loss, calls for a new understanding of ethics. These essays on otherness, responsibility and hospitality raise urgent questions. Contributors range from the prominent-including Levinas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben-to recent theorists such as Judith Butler, Enrique Dussell and Rosi Braidotti. The essays emphasize the always vulnerable status of a radically different Other, even as they question what responsibility to that Other might mean.

The News from Poems examines a subgenre of recent American poetrythat closely engages with contemporary political and social issues. This"engaged" poetry features a range of aesthetics and focuses on publictopics from climate change to the aftermath of recent wars in Afghanistanand Iraq to the increasing corporatization of U.S. culture. The News from Poems brings together newly commissioned essays byeminent poets and scholars of poetry and serves as a companion volumeto an earlier anthology of engaged poetry compiled by the editors. Essaysby Bob Perelman, Steven Gould Axelrod, Tony Hoagland, Eleanor Wilner,and others reveal how recent poetry has redefined our ideas of politics,authorship, identity, and poetics. The volume showcases the diversity of contemporary American poetry,discussing mainstream and experimental poets, including some whosework has sparked significant controversy. These and other poets of ourtime, the volume suggests, are engaged not only with public events andtopics but also with new ways of imagining subjectivity, otherness, andpoetry itself.

From Sylvia Plath's depictions of the Holocaust as a group of noncohering "bits" to AIDS elegies' assertions that the dead posthumously persist in ghostly form and Susan Howe's insistence that the past can be conveyed only through juxtaposed "scraps," the condition of being too late is one that haunts postWorld War II American poetry. This is a poetry saturated with temporal delay, partial recollection of the past, and the revelation that memory itself is accessible only in obstructed and manipulated ways. These postwar poems do not merely describe the condition of lateness: they enact it literally and figuratively by distorting chronology, boundary, and syntax, by referring to events indirectly, and by binding the condition of lateness to the impossibility of verifying the past. The speakers of these poems often indicate that they are too late by repetitively chronicling distorted events, refusing closure or resolution, and forging ghosts out of what once was tangible.Ghostly Figures contends that this poetics of belatedness, along with the way it is bound to questions of poetic making, is a central, if critically neglected, force in postwar American poetry. Discussing works by Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Susan Howe, and a group of poets responding to the AIDS epidemic, Ann Keniston draws on and critically assesses trauma theory and psychoanalysis, as well as earlier discussions of witness, elegy, lyric trope and figure, postmodernism, allusion, and performance, to define the ghosts that clearly dramatize poetics of belatedness throughout the diverse poetry of post-World War II America.