American Reads

This is not just another book about Pearl Harbor. It is the story of Joseph Grew, America's ambassador to Japan, and his frantic effort in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack to orchestrate an agreement between Japan and the United States to avoid the war he saw coming. It is a story filled with hope and heartache, with complex and fascinating characters, and with a drama befitting the momentous decisions at stake.

This book offers the first sustained study of the ways 21st century North American poems engage with financialization. It argues that recent poems about economics not only discuss but enact concerns with containment and agency essential to the contemporary financialized economy by manipulating the seemingly old-fashioned figures of synecdoche (the representation of the whole by the part) and prosopopeia or personification. Its four body chapters offer in-depth readings of the work of eleven formally, culturally, and thematically diverse contemporary U.S. and Canadian poets who variously consider labor, consumerism, debt, and the derivative form; the Coda reads several recent poems about reparations in terms of an emerging tendency to emphasize the historical, racialized, and ethical contexts of contemporary economics. As the book explores financialization’s representation in recent poetry, it redresses arguments that poetry is irrelevant to contemporary culture.