Volume 36, Issue 2-3, 1 December 2025
Lyric beyond Containment
This special issue expands on debates in lyric theory by reconsidering the bounds of poetic and lyric forms. Contributors explore the fictions of lyric subjectivity and aesthetic autonomy, the presumed whiteness of the lyric “I,” and the colonial legacies of key lyric theorists. At the same time, they theorize lyric tropes beyond these limitations by considering abstraction, figuration, apostrophe, confessionalism, and intimacy apart from the presupposed individual expression that still largely defines and derails lyric studies. The collection reflects on records of subjectivity enmeshed in complex political and historical worlds, opening new possibilities for reading lyric and for poetry studies more broadly.
Contributors
- “Lyric beyond Containment”
Sarah Dowling and Claire Grandy - “Lyric Exposure”
Tristram Wolff - “Call It a Poem: Sex’s Address”
Jacques Khalip - “‘Lucky Pierre Style’; or, Lyric Gratification”
Forest (Tres) Pyle - “Lyric Selfhood and Lyric Cellphies in Margaret Christakos’s Her Paraphernalia”
Heather Milne - “‘What Welfare Does to You’: Personhood in Baltimore’s Chicory”
Keegan Cook Finberg - “‘The wren nesting in the razor wire’: Lyric Containment, Captive Persons, and Animal Life”
Andrea Brady - “The Poetry Police”
Jan Mieszkowski - “Surveilling the Poetic Body: Organic Unity, Ballad Meter, and Colonial Control of the Ghazal Form”
Sara Grewal - “The Americanity of the ‘American Lyric’: Claudia Rankine in Ibero-American Translation”
Whitney Devos - “Recasting Dialectics: Hannah Black’s Deep Cuts”
Amy De'Ath - “‘Progress is a myth,’ and Air? The Force of Freedom and Nonsovereign Death in Robert Hayden’s Revisions of ‘Frederick Douglass’”
Ren Ellis Neyra - “Three Forms of Poetic Exaltation”
David Marriott - “Notes on the Lyric and the Aurora Borealis”
Susan Briante