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The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time offers original readings of poems composed in this century—poems that are challenging to follow, challenging to understand, challenging to discuss, and challenging to enjoy. Difficult poetry of the past relied on allusion, syntactic complexity, free association, and strange juxtapositions. The new poetry breaks with the old in its stunning variety; its questioning of inherited values, labels, and narratives; its multilingualism; its origin in and production of unnamed affects; and its coherence around critical and social theorists as much as other poets. The essays in this volume include poets writing on the works of a younger generation (Lyn Hejinian on Paolo Javier, Bob Perelman on Rachel Zolf, Roberto Tejada on Rosa Alcalá), influential writers addressing the work of peers (Ben Lerner on Maggie Nelson, Michael W. Clune on Aaron Kunin), critics making imaginative leaps to encompass challenging work (Brian M. Reed on Sherwin Bitsui, Siobhan Philips on Juliana Spahr), and younger scholars coming to terms with poets who continue to govern new poetic experimentation (Joseph Jeon on Myung Mi Kim, Lytle Shaw on Lisa Robertson). In pairings that are both intuitive (Marjorie Perloff on Craig Dworkin) and unexpected (Langdon Hammer on Srikanth Reddy), The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time illuminates the myriad pathways and strategies for exploring difficult poetry of the present.
Poetry Matters explores poetry written by women from the United States and Canada, which documents the social and political turmoil of the early twenty-first century and places this poetry in dialogue with recent currents of feminist theory including new materialism, affect theory, posthumanism, and feminist engagements with neoliberalism and capitalism. Central to this project is the conviction that a poetics that explores the political dimensions of affect; demonstrates an understanding of subjectivity as posthuman and transcorporeal; critically reflects on the impact of capitalism on queer, racialized, and female bodies; and develops an ethical vocabulary for reimagining the nation state and critically engaging with issues of democracy and citizenship is now more urgent than ever before. Milne focuses on poetry published after 2001 by writers who mostly began writing after the feminist writing movements of the 1980s, but who have inherited and built upon their political and aesthetic legacies. The poets discussed in this book—including Jennifer Scappettone, Margaret Christakos, Larissa Lai, Rita Wong, Nikki Reimer, Rachel Zolf, Yedda Morrison, Marcella Durand, Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Dionne Brand, Jena Osman, and Jen Benka—bring a sense of political agency to poetry. These voices seek new vocabularies and dissenting critical and aesthetic frameworks for thinking across issues of gender, materiality, capitalism, the toxic convergences of nationalism and racism, and the decline of democratic institutions. This is poetry that matters—both in its political urgency and in its attentiveness to the world as “matter”—as a material entity under siege. It could not be more timely or more relevant.
Since the 1980s, poets in Canada and the U.S. have increasingly turned away from the use of English, bringing multiple languages into dialogue—and into conflict—in their work. This growing but under-studied body of writing differs from previous forms of multilingual poetry. While modernist poets offered multilingual displays of literary refinement, contemporary translingual poetries speak to and are informed by feminist, anti-racist, immigrant rights, and Indigenous sovereignty movements. Although some translingual poems have entered Chicanx, Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous literary canons, translingual poetry has not yet been studied as a cohesive body of writing. The first book-length study on the subject, Translingual Poetics argues for an urgent rethinking of Canada and the U.S.’s multiculturalist myths. Dowling demonstrates that rising multilingualism in both countries is understood as new and as an effect of cultural shifts toward multiculturalism and globalization. This view conceals the continent’s original Indigenous multilingualism and the ongoing violence of its dismantling. It also naturalizes English as traditional, proper, and, ironically, native. Reading a range of poets whose work contests this “settler monolingualism”—Jordan Abel, Layli Long Soldier, Myung Mi Kim, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, M. NourbeSe Philip, Rachel Zolf, Cecilia Vicuña, and others—Dowling argues that translingual poetry documents the flexible forms of racialization innovated by North American settler colonialisms. Combining deft close readings of poetry with innovative analyses of media, film, and government documents, Dowling shows that translingual poetry’s avoidance of authentic, personal speech reveals the differential forms of personhood and non-personhood imposed upon the settler, the native, and the alien.
If feminism has always been characterized by its divisions, it is metafeminism, a term coined by Lori Saint-Martin, that defines and embraces that disorder. As a carefully devised reading practice, metafeminism understands contemporary feminist literature and theory as both recalling and extending the tropes and politics of the past. In Cautiously Hopeful Marie Carrière brings together seemingly disparate writing by Anglo-Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois women authors under the banner of metafeminism. Familiarizing readers with major streams of feminist thought, including intersectionality, affect theory, and care ethics, Carrière shows how literary works by such authors as Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Naomi Fontaine, Larissa Lai, Tracey Lindberg, and Rachel Zolf, among others, tackle the entanglement of gender with race, settler-invader colonialism, heteronormativity, positionality, language, and the posthuman condition. Meanwhile tenable alliances among Indigenous women, women of colour, and settler feminist practitioners emerge. Carrière's tone is personal and accessible throughout - in itself a metafeminist gesture that both encompasses and surpasses a familiar feminist form of writing. Despite the growing anti-feminist backlash across media platforms and in various spheres of political and social life, a hopefulness animates this timely work that, like metafeminism, stands alert to the challenges that feminism faces in its capacity to effect social change in the twenty-first century.
Social Poesis introduces readers to the work of one of Canada’s most exciting and challenging poets. Through selections from across Rachel Zolf's poetic oeuvre, this book foregrounds the philosophical, ethical, and political questions that inform Zolf's poetry. Selections range from early poems in which Zolf explores transhistorical trauma and queer subjectivity to more recent writings that examine militarism, settler colonialism, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence. Zolf’s poetry enacts what she calls a “social poesis”; she is attuned to questions of ethical responsibility and the role, and limitations, of poetry as a tool for ethical thinking, political engagement, accountability, and bearing witness. Heather Milne's introduction examines Zolf's compositional strategies, tracing the evolution of Zolf’s writing from an autobiographical poetics, in which Zolf as subject/speaker is locatable, toward a poetics that moves beyond the self to address political and ethical relations among subjects of geopolitics and settler colonialism. In her afterword, Zolf focuses on her most recent work, in which poems are composed almost entirely from archival sources and enact a kind of collective assemblage of enunciation.
The study of affect is one of the most exciting and wide-ranging topics to have emerged in the humanities and social sciences in recent years and continues to generate research and debate. It has particularly important implications for the study of gender, as this outstanding handbook amply demonstrates. It is the most comprehensive volume to date, engaging with the intersections between gender and affect studies. A global and interdisciplinary range of contributors articulate the connections (and disconnections) between gender, sexuality, and affect in a range of geographical and historical contexts. Comprising over 40 chapters, the Companion is divided into six parts: Affects of Gender Affective Relations, Relational Affects Affective Practices Representing Affects Geographical and Spatial Affects Affects of History, Histories of Affect Topics examined include intersections between gender and affect over topics including queerness, trans*, feminism, masculinity, race/ethnicity, disability, animality, media, posthumanism, technology, sound, labor, neoliberalism, protest, and temporality. This is an outstanding collection that will be invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines, including gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, literature, media, and sociology.
Kanade, di Goldene Medine offers a broad study of its field, with equal attention to English- and French-language materials and contexts. The volume’s essays highlight the fundamental link between the culture and life of Canadian Jews and their Polish roots. This focus brings Yiddish to the fore, in essays focusing on the history of Canadian Yiddish literature, and the relevance of the language for contemporary Canadian Chasidic communities. However, essays in this volume also highlight the writings of contemporary authors, working both in French and English. Thus, the collection explores culture at the borderlands of three languages, with an eye for the link between New Worlds and Old. Kanade, di Goldene Medine apporte une contribution importante à l’étude de la littérature et la culture juives canadiennes, tout en étant attentif aux textes et contextes anglophone et francophone ainsi qu’à l’univers particulier des juifs hassidiques de Montréal. Le volume tient également compte du lien fondamental entre la créativité des juifs canadiens et leurs racines est-européennes, en particulier polonaises, et de la présence de la langue yiddish − ou de son imaginaire − dans leurs textes sous forme de traduction ou autotraduction. Le lecteur pourra cerner dans ce livre des perspectives transversales qui mettent en relation des itinéraires multiples et diversifiés noués entre le Nouveau Monde et le Vieux.
