Book News: Poetry, a laughing matter?

Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America

BY CALISTA MCRAE

Cornell University Press, October 2020

Hardback ISBN: 9781501750977

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501750977/lyric-as-comedy/#bookTabs=1

A poet walks into a bar... In Lyric as Comedy, Calista McRae explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, she finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn.

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Lyric as Comedy draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. McRae reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging.

The close readings in Lyric as Comedy also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, McRae captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.

"This is an immensely pleasurable book to read. McRae is a beautiful reader of poetry, and her attention to form and her serious thinking through of her material is evident on every page. I cannot overstate the quality of McRae's subtle way of reading."

--Gillian White, University of Michigan, author of Lyric Shame

"Calista McRae wittily and incisively examines how the inwardness and embarrassment of mid-century lyric resembles the abjection of stand-up comedy. A tightly-argued, beautifully written book, Lyric as Comedy reveals the complexity and slipperiness of the speaking 'I' on the page or the stage. McRae shows how pervasive and important comic technique is, even in apparently quite serious poems."

--Rachel Trousdale, Framingham State University, editor of Humor in Modern American Poetry

Calista McRae is Assistant Professor of English at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.