Chris Nealon Discusses Three of Contemporary Poetry's Militants: Anne Boyer, Sandra Simonds, & Jasmine Gibson

At Lana Turner, Chris Nealon draws readers' attention to three new collections of poetry by women who are writing from political struggles with "an effortless, vernacular awareness rich with the complex overlay of histories in the present." These new books by Anne Boyer, Sandra Simonds, and Jasmine Gibson are equal parts wry, sharp, and honest.

Given the kinds of work poets do to keep writing – teaching, service work etc. – this work hovers on a boundary between being merely exploitative and dehumanizing, and being actually generative of surplus value for a capitalist employer. It is poetry consonant with Aaron Benanav’s concept of surplus populations, of deindustrialization, secular decline, and the increasingly precarious character of all “gig” work. In each of these three poets, the pathos (and the comedy) of questions of social reproduction leads to startling and beautiful modes of what we might call a new poetic militancy.

My first example comes from Anne Boyer’s 2015 volume, Garments Against Women. The book as a whole is an unremitting interrogation of the conditions of writing while a single mother, writing while a woman, writing without access to much money, writing while undergoing treatment for cancer. In a poem toward the end of the book, called “Not Writing,” Boyer describes the many genres in which she says she is not participating:

I am not writing anything anyone has requested of me or is waiting on, not a poetics essay or any other sort of essay, not a roundtable response, not interview responses, not writing prompts for younger writers, not my thoughts about critical theory or popular songs.

Continue at Lana Turner.