InThe Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, poet Joyelle McSweeney presents an ecopoetics and a theory of Art that reflect such biological principles as degradation, proliferation, contamination, and decay. In these ambitious, bustling essays, McSweeney resituates poetry as a medium amid media; hosts strange meetings of authors, texts, and artworks across the boundaries of genre, period, and nation; and examines such epiphenomena as translation, anachronism, and violence. Through readings of artists as diverse as Wilfred Owen, Andy Warhol, Harryette Mullen, Roberto Bolano, Aime...

David Wojahn examines the state of American verse as it enters the first decades of a new millennium, focusing on both the challenges and opportunities of an ancient art as it tries to adapt to the cultural, technological, and political transformations of our turbulent era. Each of these nine essays makes an impassioned and nuanced argument against the so-called marginalization of poetry in contemporary American culture. Among the work included is a penetrating essay on the role of politics in contemporary verse, a querulous examination of the rise of what Wojahn terms "the Google poem," and...

Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition gathers Rigoberto Gonzalez's most important essays and book reviews that consider the work of emerging poets whose identities and political positions are transforming what readers expect from contemporary poetry. Many of these voices represent intersectional communities, such as queer writers of color like Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Eduardo C. Corral, and many writers, such as Carmen Gimenez Smith and David Tomas Martinez, have deep connections to their Latino communities. Collectively these writers are enriching American poetry to...

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

The Mirror Diary tracks the emergence of an original poetic voice and a learned consciousness amid multiple and sometimes competing influences of complex literary traditions and regional and ethnic histories. Beginning with a literary inquiry into the history of Japanese Americans in Hawaii and California, Garrett Hongo draws on his own history to consider the...