Kirjahaku

Poetry and Emergent Worlds explores how some of the most innovative strategies, forms and themes in postwar American poetry are concerned with ideas of the child and with childishness. The book offers a survey of the relationship between poetry, childhood and sexuality in a range of 20th and 21st-century American poets. Drawing upon the latest perspectives from psychoanalytic and queer theories of the child, the book demonstrates the extent to which the child stands as a central figure in our thinking about American culture and to its poetic traditions in particular. The book examines work by a range of postwar American poets, from Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Joe Brainard to Claudia Rankine, micha c rdenas and Andrea Brady.

Mysterious, esoteric, baffling – John Ashbery is notorious for the seeming difficulty of his work. But Ashbery is also entertaining, humorous and charming, and responsive to his shifting social and political contexts. This biography charts his emergence from a minor avant-garde figure to the most important poet of his generation.In this entertaining account, Jess Cotton provides a legible and accessible map of Ashbery’s work that draws connections between the poetry, the New York art and literary world and the political climate of the middle decades of the twentieth century. It makes the case for a more approachable, enjoyable and engaged Ashbery and will appeal to both students and the general reader, as well as anyone interested in American poetry, queer lives and twentieth-century history.