This chapter traces the development in the United States of the lyric essay (and, peripherally, essayistic poetry), with a focus on three contemporary writers: Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, and Maggie Nelson. Beginning with competing definitions of this hybrid genre whose contours are not always easy to discern, the chapter describes the role of American creative writing programs and the poetry classroom in the emergence of this special type of writing, which has gained ground in the early years of the twenty-first century. Examples from the lyric essays of Carson, Dillard, and Nelson are then read closely in an attempt to isolate the features unique to this genre celebrated by John D’Agata and Deborah Tall in their manifesto "New Terrain: The Lyric Essay" (1997).

This chapter surveys the history of nature writing and the nature essay, from American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller to more recent writers such as Barry Lopez, Amitav Ghosh, and Camille T. Dungy. The author examines the political and scientific aspects of nature writing and the genre’s response to changing conceptions of “nature.”