What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. The first volume, Every Goodbye Ain't Gone, covers the period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In What I Say, editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a comprehensive and dynamic collection that brings this pivotal work up to the present day.

The elder poets in this collection, such as Nathaniel...

In Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries, Mark Scroggins writes with wit and dash about a fascinating range of key twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets and writers. In nineteen lively and accessible essays, he persuasively argues that the innovations of modernist verse were not replaced by postmodernism, but rather those innovations continue to infuse contemporary writing and poetry with intellectual and aesthetic richness.
In these essays, Scroggins reviews the legacy of Louis Zukofsky, delineates the exceptional influence of the Black Mountain poets, and...

The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics is a probing examination of how the writing of sexual love undergoes a radical revision by avant-garde poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today, the exploration of love by poetslong a fixture of Western poetic traditionis thought to be in decline, with love itself understood to be a mere ideological overlay for the more real entities of physical sex and desire.
In The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics, Jeanne Heuving claims that a key achievement of poetry by Ezra Pound, H.D., Robert...

By what narrow path is the ineffable silence of Zen cleft by the scratch of a pen? The distilled insights of forty years, Norman Fischer's Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion is a collection of essays by Zen master Fischer about experimental writing as a spiritual practice.

Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Fischer embraced the twin practices of Zen Buddhism and innovative poetics in San Francisco in the early 1970s. His work includes original poetry, descriptions of Buddhist practice, translations of the Hebrew psalms, and eclectic writings on a range of...

Archaeopoetics explores archaeological poetry, ground-breaking and experimental writing by innovative poets whose work opens up broad new avenues by which contemporary readers may approach the past, illuminating the dense web of interconnections often lost in traditional historiography.
Critic Mandy Bloomfield traces the emergence of a significant historicist orientation in recent poetry, exemplified by the work of five writers: American poet Susan Howe, Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, British poet Maggie O Sullivan, and diasporic African Caribbean writers Kamau...

Larry Eigner began writing poetry at age eight and was first published at age nine. Revered by poets and artists across a broad spectrum of generations and schools, Eigner's remarkably moving poetry was created through enormous effort: because of severe physical disabilities, he produced his texts by typing with only one index finger and thumb on a 1940 Royal manual typewriter, creating a body of work that is unparalleled in its originality.

Calligraphy Typewriters showcases the most celebrated of Eigner's several thousand poems, which are an important part of the Black...

Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture, and Perception in Art and Writing since 1950 is an expansive and incisive examination of the patterns of connectedness in contemporary art and poetry. Allen Fisher a highly accomplished poet, painter, critic, and art historian as well as a key figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s and 1970s has a close and discerning connection to his subjects.
In Imperfect Fit, Fisher focuses on the role of fracturing, ruptures, and breakages in many traditional ties between art and poetry, as well as the resulting use of collage and...

In Modernism the Morning After, Bob Perelman scrutinizes a number of long-held modernist dogmas in order to articulate a more capacious model for thinking about modernism, past, present, and future.

Modernism the Morning After is a superb, lively, engaging series of essays and talks, dating from 1995 to 2016, by the eminent scholar, critic, and poet Bob Perelman. Throughout his career, Perelman has focused on the persistence of modernist ambition in poetry, with all of its admirable articulations and tragicomic short-circuits. Poetry, it turns out, is not simply "news...

Word Toys: Poetry and Technics is an engaging and thought provoking volume that speculates on a range of textual works--poetic, novelistic, and programmed--as technical objects.

With the ascent of digital culture, new forms of literature and literary production are thriving that include multimedia, networked, conceptual, and other as-yet-unnamed genres while traditional genres and media--the lyric, the novel, the book--have been transformed. Word Toys: Poetry and Technics is an engaging and thought-provoking volume that speculates on a range of poetic, novelistic,...