...José Esteban Muñoz This piece reflects on two orders of the poetic event. On one hand, it describes Fred Moten’s reading of the poem “the gramsci monument” at the public art project of the same name. On the other, it meditates on the event that the poem registers, or the general antagonism...

...Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas This piece is a poem assembled from SMS texts, e-mails, letters, book dedications, and notes authored by José Esteban Muñoz and sent over the course of several years to some of his close friends and collaborators. An introduction to the piece suggests how the assemblage might...

...Julietta Singh This poetic series in nine parts attunes to the subject’s complex and abiding attachment to the object. The unfixed voices of these poems subtly shift across the series, from subject to object to yet a third “social” position. The poems move through a queer temporality in which...

...Anna McCarthy A short poem about the automation of thought. ©2016 American Association of Critical-Care Nurses 2016 tools content digital humanities This is a poem that builds itself using tools that build new tools. Renumbering. Remembering. New tools that know what poems...

...Solmaz Sharif A poem. Copyright © Duke University Press 2017 poetry sign reading CHOOSE LIFE sign reading SOLVE THE WATER CRISIS sign reading WARNING UNEXPLODED SHELLS sign reading DATE SHAKES which did not mean as we guessed shaking the palm trees until the dates fell but what...

...Fady Joudah Medical anthropology poem. Copyright © Duke University Press 2017 poetry That syphilis leads to deafness isn’t enough for Beethoven to have died of it. There’s Baudelaire and Nietzsche’s tempo, or did Emily Dickinson suffer from seizures? Did Muhammad? If so...

...Fady Joudah Medical anthropology poem. Copyright © Duke University Press 2017 poetry professor who ran the anatomy department and was a preacher’s son. You were an ex-preacher yourself, abandoned the cloth after you divorced your wife and married your lover. Thank you for your hands...

...After Globalism Writing Group A collaboratively written prose poem about failure. Copyright © 2018 Duke University Press 2018 bodies collectivity failure There is a little secret about normal: most people aren’t. Most people break the rules, most people deviate from the script, most...

...After Globalism Writing Group A collaboratively written prose poem about activism and feelings. Someone attempts to use the human microphone and, instead of using a brief “mic check” call and response to initiate call and response for something more substantive, they accidentally initiate a chant...

...Erin Trapp This article provides a reading of the nonhuman world registered in Dunya Mikhail’s poem Diary of a Wave outside the Sea . While human rights poetry traditionally assembles a poetics of witnessing or mourning and focuses on the construction of the human person, this reading of Mikhail’s...

... and critical dissent. I had been exploring the postcolonial novel as a literary form engaged in social critique. Reading Meena Alexander’s Illiterate Heart in the months following the devastation made me reflect on the place of the lyric poem in the public sphere. What were the possibilities...

... Tagore prose poem, The Flute, and the same literary debates in 1930s Bengal between younger poets and Tagore that form the backdrop for “Sahitye Aitihasikata.”17 Chakrabarty, in his analysis of The Flute, fails to carry the argument to Eliot; a study of Eliot’s Gerontion alongside Tagore’s Flute...

... homeland is not a suitcase” references Darwish’s 1969 poem “Diary of a Palestinian Wound.” See Darwish, Habibati tanhad min nawmiha . 47 Even here, in this caption to a photograph, there is a poetic paronomasia on the three-letter root j-m-ʿ , which forms the radical for the words university...

... In Search of Lourdes Casal’s “Ana Veldford” As with most good mysteries, it all started in the fall of 2003 with a ques- Frances tion that did not have an answer — at least for the moment. Negrón-Muntaner Both of us were independently teaching a poem canonical in Cuban, and Yolanda...

... formulation in depth here.46 My point in referencing the poems is to suggest secondary affect- ­economies that take shape in the space of confinement, materializing bodies in geographically and historically specific ways unexpected by the logic of torture. Such logics remain unknowable...

... for, mobilize, and demand a nurturing of undocumented lives. The first section of this essay deals with undocumented Afro-Indigenous poet Alan Pelaez Lopez's poem “sick in ‘america,’ ” where they show how US laws and policies as biotechnologies of debilitation place undocumented immigrants in a state...

..., the horizon of care affixed to true north? Turning from the river you pointed out a figure scratched between twin elks, a face for hunger, a female glyph, wide open on black rock. Our clothes are prised off in a brutal wind and these poems, cloud-tossed particulars, sharp with need, sprung in the ash...

... and occasionally in print. Our fateful encounter with José Esteban Muñoz and Fred Moten at Thomas Hirschorn’s “Gramsci Monument” was in retrospect an opening salvo. 4 How do we think about the event of the poem now? Is poetry a complement, corrective, or challenge to the jargon mongering we stand accused...