The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time

INTRODUCTION
 
I. CONTINUITIES
 
1. Langdon Hammer: Voice and Erasure in Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager 
2. Al Filreis: Rewriting the Sonnet’s Cunning: On Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets
3. Aaron Kunin: Trouble with Difficulty: Jacqueline Waters’s “The Tax” 
4. Charles Altieri: Some Contemporary Roles For Difficulty in Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s People on Sunday
5. John Wilkinson: The Dark Looks of “The Husband”
6. Michael W. Clune: The Science of Creation: On Aaron Kunin’s “First”
 
II. TROUBLED AFFECTS
 
      THE PLIGHTS OF LYRIC        
7. Siobhan Philips: On Spahr’s Poem “switching”
8. Michael Davidson: Attended with Trouble: Jena Osman’s “Persona Ficta”
9. Ben Lerner: After Difficulty
 
       LOCATING AUTHENTICITY
10. Judith Goldman: “A poem of how to be”: Abjection and Biopolitical Capitalism in Ariana Reines’s “RENDERED”
11. Cary Nelson: From Private to Public Worlds: The Evolution of Atsuro Riley’s Hyper-Hyphenated Universe
12. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon: Paranoid Poetics: Targeting and Evasion in Myung Mi Kim’s Penury 
 
III. ADDRESSING THE MULTIPLE
 
      NEGOTIATING DIFFERENCE
13. Brian Reed: Sherwin Bitsui’s Blank Dictionary: Navajo Poetics and Non-Indigenous Readers
14. Nadia Nurhussein: Patter as Misdirection in Douglas Kearney’s “The Miscarriage: A Minstrel Show”
15. Jeanne Heuving: “What is More Precise than Precision?” Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence
16. Evie Shockley: Difficulty Bees as Difficulty Does
 
       MULTI-LINGUAL MODES
17. Roberto Tejada: Difficulties That Matter: Rosa Alcalá’s Voice Activation
18. Lyn Hejinian: Incipient Lust
19. Jennifer Scappettone: Street Linguistics and Daggering Lingua Francas in Latasha N. Nevada Diggs: Tuning to the “Clusterfuck of Tongues”
 
IV. RHETORICS OF INFORMATION
 
      LOCATING FORM
           
20. Bob Perelman: Ethical Character Recognition          
21. Lytle Shaw: Robertson’s Research
22. Geoffrey G. O’Brien: “Distributed via whatever”: Locating Form in Kevin Davies’ “Lateral Argument”
 
      CONCEPTUALISM AND CONSEQUENCE
 
23. Nicholas D. Nace: In Bad Taste: Type, Token, and Tone in Vanessa Place’s “First Stone”
24. Adalaide Morris: Hellocasting the Holocaust: Appropriative Poetry as an Ethical Practice
25. Jennifer Ashton: Self-Expression without Self-Expression: The Political Meaning of Self -Evident Poems
26. Marjorie Perloff: Meditation as Mediation: Craig Dworkin in the Pine-Woods
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 
CONTRIBUTOR BIOS