Books in the Contemporary North American Poetry series

Why have so many contemporary poets turned to source material, from newspapers to governmental records, as inspiration for their poetry? How can citational poems offer a means of social engagement? Michael Leong reveals that much of the power of contemporary poetry rests in its potential to select, adapt and extend public documentation.

Experimental poetry responded to historical change in the decades after World War II, with an attitude of such casual and reckless originality that its insights have often been overlooked. However, as Benjamin Lee argues, to ignore them is to overlook a rich resource for our own complicated transition into the twenty-first century.

In this first book of essays devoted entirely to Nathaniel Mackey's work, critics respond to a major oeuvre that is at once affirmative and utopic, negational and dystopic. Mackey's work envisions cultural creation as cross-cultural, based in the damaging relationships of Africans brought against their will to the Americas.