The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry

Timothy Yu

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781108482097
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108656009
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A new poetic century demands a new set of approaches. This Companion shows that American poetry of the twenty-first century, while having important continuities with the poetry of the previous century, takes place in new modes and contexts that require new critical paradigms. Offering a comprehensive introduction to studying the poetry of the new century, this collection highlights the new, multiple centers of gravity that characterize American poetry today. Essays on African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries respond to the centrality of issues of race and indigeneity in contemporary American discourse. Other essays explore poetry and feminism, poetry and disability, and queer poetics. The environment, capitalism, and war emerge as poetic preoccupations, alongside a range of styles from spoken word to the avant-garde, and an examination of poetry's place in the creative writing era.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 New Black Aesthetics: Post–Civil Rights African American Poetry
• 2 Traditions of Innovation in Asian American Poetry
• 3 Locations of Contemporary Latina/o Poetry
• 4 Sovereign Poetics and Possibilities in Indigenous Poetry
• 5 Changing Topographies, New Feminisms, and Women Poets
• 6 The Nearly Baroque in Contemporary Poetry
• 7 Disability Aesthetics and Poetic Practice
• 8 Queer Poetry and Bioethics
• 9 Trauma and the Avant-Garde
• 10 Blockade Chants and Cloud-Nets: Terminal Poetics of the Anthropocene
• 11 Give Me Poems and Give Me Death: On the End of Slam(?)
• 12 Anti-capitalist Poetry
• 13 Of Poetry and Permanent War in the Twenty-First-Century
• 14 Poetry in the Program Era
• 15 The Future of Poetry Studies
• Further Reading
• Index