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Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

Introduction: Cultural Analytics Now

Call it cultural analytics or distant reading or data-rich literary studies. It is that branch of digital humanities that most leans on quantitative methods to understand its objects. For much…

Issue 2: How To Be Now, Peer Reviewed Articles

Ironies of Web 2.0

Damon R. Young

Issue 2: How To Be Now, Peer Reviewed Articles

Issue 2: How To Be Now, Peer Reviewed Articles

😂; or, The Word of the Year

C. Namwali Serpell

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

The Social Forms of Speculative Poetics

From popular dystopian narratives to steampunk, zombie and horror tales to Afrosurrealist texts and alternate histories, speculative modes proliferate across our contemporary cultural landscape. Speculative aesthetics play on the tense,…

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

Window Poetics

I dwell in Possibility -A fairer House than Prose -More numerous of Windows -Superior – for Doors – What’s a window, to a poet? For Emily Dickinson, above, the act…

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

Translating a Milestone: Mon Emily Dickinson in France

In what follows, I explore how the 2017 French translation of Susan Howe’s landmark 1985 text, My Emily Dickinson, as Mon Emily Dickinson by the Dickinson scholar and prolific translator…

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

“The Jewel of the North”: Mateo Galindo’s “Encadenar” in Space

all that you touch you changeall that you change changes you [ . . . ] During this “Dim Age” governments defined parts of the North American Southwest as zones…

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

“The Mayor Is a Tough Act to Follow”: Some Social Poetry in the Theaters of the Rahm Regime

One Chicago evening in spring 2013, I sat behind Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a small black box theater. We had gathered to see the experimental troupe Theater Oobleck as they…

Contemporaries Essays, Poetry's Social Forms

The Opacity of Racial Form

In “Toward a Personal Semantics,” a poem published in June Jordan’s 1971 collection Some Changes, Jordan describes a speaker’s hesitation at trusting an unnamed interlocutor’s words: if I do take…