Book News: guide to studying poetry of the new century

The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry

EDITED BY TIMOTHY YU 

Cambridge UP, 2021

ISBN: 9781108741958 Paperback

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/cambridge-companion-twenty-first-century-american-poetry?format=PB

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.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

• Offers a wide-ranging introduction to the study of American poetry in the twenty-first century
• Each essay explores continuity with twentieth-century poetry but also emphasizes the rapidly changing context and paradigms for reading poetry in the twenty-first century
• Brings the study of American poetry into the present by highlighting and reflecting the growing diversity of American poetic production

Timothy Yu is author of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965, editor of Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets, and author of a poetry collection,100 Chinese Silences. He is the Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.