"Poetic Investigations" studies five contemporary writers whose radical engagements with poetic form and political content shed new light on issues of race, class, and gender. In a detailed reading of three American poets--Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Lyn Hejinian--and two African-Caribbean poets, Kamau Brathwaite and M. Nourbese Philip, Paul Naylor argues that these writers have produced new forms of poetry that address the "holes," or erasures, in history that more traditional poetry neglects.