Anational Poetics

Anational Poetics Synopsis

With this book, Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz recovers the political implications of poetic form in the work of a wide range of Black, Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous poets from the civil rights movement to the present. Anational Poetics studies these poets' radical questioning of their belonging to the United States and to the nation in general, with its logics of death and containment, as it tracks the resources they offer for imagining and pursuing alternative forms of belonging, away from the nation.

This ambitious new literary history of the political horizons of US minoritarian literature reads across archives and traditions to bring together Amiri Baraka and Alexis Pauline Gumbs; Gloria Anzaldúa and Jennifer Tamayo; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, and Don Mee Choi; and Simon J. Ortiz and Craig Santos Perez.

The frameworks established to read US nonwhite poets so far have unintentionally isolated and neutralized the wide range of political ambitions that Sarmiento Cruz uncovers in this book. Attending to fugitivity and fragmentation, dictation and decolonial spatiotemporalities, Sarmiento Cruz interprets these writers' experiments with literary form as simultaneously experiments with political form.