The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to studying the diversity of American poetry in the twenty-first century.

This book provides students and academic researchers with a high-level introduction to major issues in the study of contemporary American poetry. These original essays survey African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetry, as well as the intersection of poetry and the environment, disability, bioethics, and capitalism.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.