BOOK NEWS: Post-1960 poetry speaks directly to eroding notions of public life

Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public

By Keegan Cook Finberg

Columbia UP, 2025

ISBN: 9780231219228

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-in-general/9780231219228/

In the second half of the twentieth century, poetry leapt out of books and became an interdisciplinary public form. Poetry entered bureaucratic systems of organization like index card catalogues; it pushed the boundaries of privately owned public parks. Keegan Cook Finberg argues that poetry became an increasingly capacious force during this period because it could speak directly to the degradation of the social-democratic notion of the public.

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.

Poetry in General explores how poets expanded their practice into the realms of politics, work, and everyday life from 1960 to the present, from the apex of the welfare state to an era of privatization and austerity. It considers a compelling array of figures—including Yoko Ono, George Brecht, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Bernadette Mayer, Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, and NourbeSe Philip—whose works draw on conceptual techniques to transform official documents and spaces. Finberg shows how these public texts expose the mechanisms of the neoliberal consensus about work and leisure, the state’s facilitation of capitalism, and enduring racial and gender inequities. She also provides politically charged ways to interpret and critique racial capitalism, antiabortion legislation, and mass debt. A new literary and institutional history of postwar poetics, this book shows how poetic experiments address the privatization of collective life and rethink the category of the public.

"Poetry rarely gets to be general, but Keegan Cook Finberg blasts past misconceptions of marginality, framing it as a vibrant, interdisciplinary, public practice. What a relief to see this truth so clearly stated: poetry—when at its weirdest!—is uniquely positioned to contest the state's facilitation of capital." —Sarah Dowling, author of Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form

"Keegan Cook Finberg takes poems seriously enough to see their claims on expanding the genre of poetry itself. Recognizing ambitions beyond individual expression, Poetry in General reads poems not as private refuges from social politics but as urgent interlocutors in a world of increasing privatization and politically managed bodies." —Craig Dworkin, author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography

Keegan Cook Finberg is an assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Departments of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and Language, Literacy, and Culture at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

BOOK NEWS: The evolution of Black speculative fiction and philosophy

Afrofuturism and World Order 

By Reynaldo Anderson 

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5955-9

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215944.html

In Afrofuturism and World Order, Reynaldo Anderson delves into the evolution of Black speculative thought and Afrofuturism from the early twentieth century to the present day. By locating Afrofuturism within an African geography of reason, he situates the past, present, and future of people of African descent at the intersection of speculative philosophy, science fiction, futurology, artificial intelligence, climate change, and geopolitics. Historically, Afrofuturism theorized futures for Black Americans through merging their lived experiences with science fiction, technology, music, and art. 

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.

Drawing from adaptations in Black culture and speculative thought during the Cold War, Anderson addresses the shifting focus of the genre from American to transnational, as well as the implications of modern existential threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic. By tracing the Black speculative tradition from its overlaps with Africana esotericism and certain African diaspora regions, to its intersections with astroculture and modernism, to the works of Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Octavia Butler, to the aesthetic politics of the Black Speculative Arts movement, and beyond, Anderson illuminates how Afrofuturism participates in an increasingly multipolar world.

“Anderson situates Afrofuturism within the long history of African philosophy, going beyond traditional literary studies to offer new ways to consider questions of justice, equality, and liberation. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding the intellectual power and political depth of the Black speculative imagination.” —Alex Zamalin, author of Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism

“Anderson locates the limitations of modernism as a European ideology and then uses established principles of Africology to propose new approaches to both critical and creative analysis. Afrofuturism and World Order is essential reading for Black and African studies scholars and will become a bedrock text for graduate instruction.” —Walter D. Greason, Dewitt Wallace Professor of History, Macalester College

Reynaldo Anderson is associate professor of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University and coeditor of, among others, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art + Design, and Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent. He is also the editor of The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies.

BOOK NEWS: Tracing the love embedded in Black and Asian American literatures

Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life

By Seulghee Lee

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1509-8

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215098.html

In Other Lovings, Seulghee Lee traces the presence and plenitude of love embedded in Black and Asian American literatures and cultures to reveal their irreducible power to cohere minoritarian social life. Bringing together Black studies, Asian American studies, affect theory, critical theory, and queer of color critique, Lee examines the bonds of love in works by Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, David Henry Hwang, Gayl Jones, Fred Moten, Adrian Tomine, and Charles Yu. He attends to the ontological force of love in popular culture, investigating Asian American hip-hop and sport through readings of G Yamazawa, Year of the Ox, and Jeremy Lin, as well as in Black public culture through bell hooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West.

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.

By assessing love’s positive function in these works, Lee argues against critical regimes, such as Afropessimism and racial melancholia, that center negativity. In revealing what Black and Asian American traditions share in their positive configurations of being and collectivity, and in their responses to the overarching logic of white supremacy, Other Lovings suggests possibilities for thinking beyond sociological opposition and historical difference and toward political coalition and cultural affinity. Ultimately, Other Lovings argues for a counter-ontology of love—its felt presence, its relational possibilities, and its lived practices.

“Animated by theoretical erudition and historical attunement, Other Lovings is timely and perennial. Lee’s sensitive exploration of the overlapping frontiers between Afro-American and Asian American literatures, the romance of coalition and the labor of solidarity, and love’s fragility and sociality’s renewal is an extraordinary achievement.” —Fred Moten, author of All That Beauty

“Other Lovings centers the ‘love bonds’ that make up Black and Asian American sociality. Lee thematizes the strongholds of racial melancholia, Afropessimism, and queer negativity in contemporary thought and offers a dazzling theory of the loving, ‘intramural mega-sociality’ of Asian American racial ontology and AfroAsian life.” —Vivian L. Huang, author of Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability

Seulghee Lee (he/him) is assistant professor of African American Studies and English at the University of South Carolina. He is coeditor, with Rebecca Kumar, of Queer and Femme Gazes in AfroAsian American Visual Culture.