Poetry and Emergent Worlds: American Lyric and the Unmaking of Childhood
By (Author) Jess Cotton
Edited by Daniel Katz
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Bloomsbury Academic
20th October 2025
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Literary studies: poetry and poets
Hardback
240
Width 156mm, Height 234mm, Spine 25mm
454g
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 crdenas and Andrea Brady.
Jess Cotton is a Teaching Assistant at Queen Mary, University of London, UK.