In the years since his death from alcohol poisoning, San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) has gradually come to be recognized as one of most intriguing, demanding, and rewarding of the so-called 'New American Poetry' poets who were first published in Donald Allen's historic anthology of that name.This is the first full-length critical monograph on his work, placing it in the context not only of the San Francisco Renaissance and contemporary movements with which Spicer dialogued and often disagreed - such as the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the 'New York School' - but...

This study takes as its point of departure an essential premise: that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to it, but one which renders uncanny all tropes of familiarity and immediacy which 'fatherlands' and 'mother tongues' are traditionally seen as providing. In this framework, similarly totalising notions of cultural authenticity are seen to govern both exoticist mystification and 'nativist' obsessions with the purity of the 'mother tongue.' At the same time, cosmopolitanism, translation, and...