A poem is often read as a set of formal, technical, and conventional devices that generate meaning or affect. However, Lucy Alford suggests that poetic language might be better understood as an instrument for tuning and refining the attention. Identifying a crucial link between poetic form and the forming of attention, Alford offers a new terminology for how poetic attention works and how attention becomes a subject and object of poetry. Forms of Poetic Attention combines close readings of a wide variety of poems with research in the philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology of attention. Drawing on the work of a wide variety of poets such as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, Al-Khansā’, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, and Claudia Rankine, Alford defines and locates the particular forms of attention poems both require and produce. She theorizes the process of attention-making—its objects, its coordinates, its variables—while introducing a broad set of interpretive tools into the field of literary studies. Forms of Poetic Attention makes the original claim that attention is poetry’s primary medium, and that the forms of attention demanded by a poem can train, hone, and refine our capacities for perception and judgment, on and off the page.

In André du Bouchet: Poetic Forms of Attention, Emma Wagstaff provides the first book-length study in English of this major poet of the second half of the twentieth century. She shows how Du Bouchet’s rigorous and innovative creative and critical writing advances our understanding of attention. Du Bouchet is known as a post-war poet of the natural world and the space of the page. Far from just a solitary writer, however, he engaged with others through his work as editor, critic, and translator, and his involvement in the protests of May 1968. Emma Wagstaff shows how his writing demonstrates nuanced attention to language, time, nature, and art, and incites a ‘slow’ response on the part of the reader.

Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns offers a road map for analyzing poetry through examination of poems' structure, rather than their forms or genres. Michael Theune's breakthrough concept encourages students, teachers, and writers to use structure as a tool to see the fundamental affinities between strikingly different kinds of poetry and radically different literary eras. The book includes examination of the mid-course turn and the elegy, as well as the ironic, concessional, emblem, and retrospective-prospective structures, among others. In addition, 14 contemporary poets provide an example of and commentary on their own work.

In Feeling as a Foreign Language, Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. Fulton contemplates topics ranging from the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome to fractals from the aesthetics of complexity theory to the need for "cultural incorrectness." Along the way, she falls in love with an outrageous 17th century poet, argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters, and calls for a courageous poetics of inconvenient knowledge.

The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

Companion to the Book of Literary Terms, an indispensable handbook, revised and updated for today's users.

Michael D. Hurley and Michael O'Neill offer a perceptive and illuminating look into poetic form, a topic that has come back into prominence in recent years. Building on this renewed interest in form, Hurley and O'Neill provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction that will be of help to undergraduates and more advanced readers of poetry alike. The book sees form as neither ornamenting nor mimicking content, but as shaping and animating it, encouraging readers to cultivate techniques to read poems as poems. Lively and wide-ranging, engaging with poems as aesthetic experiences, the book includes a long chapter on the elements of form that throws new light on troubling terms such as rhythm and metre, as well as a detailed introduction and accessible, stimulating chapters on lyric, the sonnet, elegy, soliloquy, dramatic monologue and ballad and narrative.

What happens when we think of poetry as a global literary form, while also thinking the global in poetic terms? Forms of a World shows how the innovations of contemporary poetics have been forged through the transformations of globalization across five decades. Sensing the changes wrought by neoliberalism before they are made fully present, poets from around the world have creatively intervened in global processes by remaking poetry’s formal repertoire. In experimental reinventions of the ballad, the prospect poem, and the ode, Hunter excavates a new, globalized interpretation of the ethical and political relevance of forms. Forms of a World contends that poetry’s role is not only to make visible thematically the violence of global dispossessions, but to renew performatively the missing conditions for intervening within these processes. Poetic acts—the rhetoric of possessing, belonging, exhorting, and prospecting—address contemporary conditions that render social life ever more precarious. Examining an eclectic group of Anglophone poets, from Seamus Heaney and Claudia Rankine to Natasha Trethewey and Kofi Awoonor, Hunter elaborates the range of ways that contemporary poets exhort us to imagine forms of social life and enable political intervention unique to but beyond the horizon of the contemporary global situation.

A straightforward and practical introduction to rhythm and meter in poetry in English.