In a field dominated by the novel, we need smart critics like Walt Hunter to explore and reveal poetry’s very different engagements with politics and economics. In Hunter’s insightful readings, we see contemporary U.S., British, Ghanaian, Iraqi, Irish, Jamaican, and Kashmiri poets turning to longstanding formal traditions—including the ode, the ghazal, and the lyric apostrophe—in order to rethink and remake poetry for our own calamitous moment. From territorial dispossession to denials of citizenship and from financial precarity to environmental devastation, Hunter shows the agonies of globalization emerging to prompt subtle and inventive poetic responses.—Caroline Levine, Cornell University Forms of a World offers a crucial reassessment of poetry’s importance in the twenty-first century.—Christopher Nealon, Johns Hopkins University
...Hunter’s Forms of a World builds his reading of largely contemporary poetry upon the synthesis of economistic Marxism and world-systems theory... Adding a welcome attention to prosody and genre to this body of work, Hunter has authored a politically committed and much-needed defense of poetry in an era defined by neoliberal claims to the “global commons.
[Hunter's] synthesis between globalization studies and poetry criticism proves mutually beneficial: as Forms of a World makes clear, an understanding of global capitalism makes poetic innovations of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries newly legible.
...Hunter’s Forms of a World remains a major achievement in contemporary criticism: one that advances beyond the national boundaries of American literature to address just how far twenty-first century poetry in the US matters to the planet and its global challenges to come.
American Literary History
This is a book that is keenly aware of the breadth and depth of contemporary poetry, the global conditions that create it, and the shifting terrain of contemporary poetry criticism... a timely and thought-provoking book that will be of interest to scholars of poetry and poets themselves, as well as students and academics looking to navigate 21st century literature through adjacent fields touching on politics, economics, social justice, and the climate crisis.
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Forms of a World is a necessary and important addition to monographs engaging with global, post-colonial, and comparative poetics, such as those written by Jahan Ramazani, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Jacob Edmond, and Omaar Hena. Readers of these texts and authors will see that this book is essential for anyone studying the sociopolitical dynamics of global poetry.
Comparative Literature Studies
In a field dominated by the novel, we need smart critics like Walt Hunter to explore and reveal poetry’s very different engagements with politics and economics. In Hunter’s insightful readings, we see contemporary U.S., British, Ghanaian, Iraqi, Irish, Jamaican, and Kashmiri poets turning to longstanding formal traditions—including the ode, the ghazal, and the lyric apostrophe—in order to rethink and remake poetry for our own calamitous moment. From territorial dispossession to denials of citizenship and from financial precarity to environmental devastation, Hunter shows the agonies of globalization emerging to prompt subtle and inventive poetic responses.
This smart, engaging, and timely book sets aside old divides like modern/postmodern in order to think periodizing according to the rhythms of capitalism. Finely written, with many moments of startling beauty and poetic nuance, Forms of a World offers a crucial reassessment of poetry’s importance in the twenty-first century.
This smart, engaging, and timely book sets aside old divides like modern/postmodern in order to think periodizing according to the rhythms of capitalism. Finely written, with many moments of startling beauty and poetic nuance, Forms of a World offers a crucial reassessment of poetry’s importance in the twenty-first century.
Johns Hopkins University Christopher Nealon
