12 - Anti-capitalist Poetry

Summary

This chapter examines the emergence of an emphatically anti-capitalist poetry in the decade since the global financial crash of 2008. There is a turn away from private, meditative poetry to a lyric speech that is public and willing to tackle rifts in the social body. It explores links among kinds of violence (racial, sexual, economic) and depredation (colonial, environmental) that liberal political language has tended to grasp in parallel rather than as part of a totality. Jasmine Gibson’s “Black Mass” coordinates the anguish of racial violence with on-the-ground relations between bosses and workers, sexuality, and geopolitics. Daniel Borzutzky’s The Performance of Becoming Human parallels contemporary police violence against black people with torture under Pinochet in Chile, making clear that the basis for the parallel is the global reach of capitalist accumulation. Allison Cobb’s After We All Died shows a willingness to let go of matter itself, in order to see how it de- and re-composes under conditions of capitalist crisis. Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction depicts the loss of the “fictions,” including beloved ones, through which we live under capitalism.