Against the frame of war (monograph)
Against the Frame of War: Experimental Poetry as Political Practice is a scholarly monograph-in-progress. In it, I argue that twenty-first-century antiwar poetry requires experimental, post-lyric strategies capable of countering the “warspeak” that frames endless U.S. militarization as peace. Tracing a genealogy from Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan’s Vietnam-era debates through to the present, the study examines how three contemporary poets—Craig Santos Perez, Don Mee Choi, and CA Conrad—deploy relational, documentary, and ritual-based poetics to forge collective political agency across dispersed decolonial, ecological, and social justice movements. Through what Joan Retallack calls “poethical wagers,” these writers transform the poetic page into a networked space of activist intervention, connecting imperial warmaking abroad to the militarization of policing and ecological devastation at home.
If you’d like to read more, you can find my essay about queer futurity, militarism, and CAConrad at Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture. It argues that CAConrad’s provocative, alliance-oriented experiments both in print poetry and in public performance critically distinguish queer appearance from queer visibility, with the aim of not only ‘dreaming,’ in José Muñoz’s terms, but also ‘enacting’ better possible futures in common with the world’s living and nonliving others.
Another article is available online at the open-access journal Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures. That essay discusses how CHamoru poet Craig Santos Perez invites new stakeholders to join Guåhan’s (Guam’s) sovereignty and demilitarization movements via his mode of “oceania composition” and strategic use of social media.