Poetics and Precarity

<p><b>Poets and critics address the potential of language to address the increasing level of discord and precarity in the twenty-first century.</b></p><p>At a time when wars acts of terrorism and ecological degradation have intensified and isolationism misogyny and ethnic divisiveness have been given distinctively more powerful voice in public discourse language itself often seems to have failed. The poets and critics in this book argue that language has the potential to address this increasing level of discord and precarity and they negotiate ways to understand poetics or the role of the poetic in relation to language the body politic the human body breath the bodies of the natural environment and the body of form.</p><p>Poetry makes urgent issues audible and poetics helps to theorize those issues into critical consciousness. Poetry also functions as a cry to protest late capitalist imperialism misogyny racism climate change and all the debilitating conditions of everyday life. Hubs of concern merge and diverge; precarity takes differently gendered historied embodied geopolitical manifestations. The contributors articulate a poetics that renders what has not yet been crystallized as discourse into fields of force. They also acknowledge the beauties of sound poetry and music and celebrate the power of community marking the surge of energy that can occur at a particular place at a particular moment. Ultimately <i>Poetics and Precarity</i> fosters further conversations that will imagine the concerns of poetics as a continuously emerging field.</p>