Contents
Introduction
Poems
Sonnet III. On the Prospect of Peace, in 1783
To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty. 1768.
Sonnet—To an American Painter Departing for Europe
Woods: A Prose Sonnet
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
Sometimes I walk where the deep water dips
Her Eyes
Assurance
One Night
A January Dandelion
Plácido’s Farewell to His Mother
Slow through the Dark
On the Capture and Imprisonment of Crazy Snake, January, 1900
Electrocution
The Matrix
Sonnets That Please
Hyla Brook
To Madame Curie
The New Negro
“So Quietly”
A Plum
Sonnet
Sonnet
America
Sonnet I
next to of course god america i
from “Sonnets from the Cherokee”
Roman Fountain
Phallus
Two Weeks
From the Dark Tower
Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem
Sonnet of Intimacy
Sonnet
Frederick Douglass
The Struggle Staggers Us
History
the rites for Cousin Vit
A Lovely Love
This Tall Horseman, My Young Man of Mars
moonshot sonnet
The Beginning
The Feast of Stephen
The Broken Home
May Morning
from “Twenty-One Love Poems”
Butchering
Sonnet: To Eva
Sonnet XXXIV
Sunflower Sonnet Number Two
the death of fred clifton
“Vagina” Sonnet
The Eye of the Storm
I want this love to be resilient
The bride is in the parlor, dear confection
MMDCCXIII½
Sonnet (You jerk you didn’t call me up)
Say Uncle
American Sonnet 18
American Sonnet 79
Tears, through the patchwork drapery of dream
I come to cafe, I sit, I bear
Sonnet for Her Labor
Glass Is Not Crystalline
Postcard from Kashmir
from “33”
Questionnaire
from “Salutations in Search Of”
The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do
Arte Povera
Givingly
Against Teleology
When
Millie and Christine McKoy
Graveyard Blues
from “Four Sonnets about Food”
Nude Palette
from “The Black and White Sonnet Series”
Ismail & Abla to Ahmed, Their Son
American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin (I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison)
from “Nets”
Kiddo
Sonnet Done Red
from “Toxic Sonnets”
Duplex
The Tradition
from “Ka ‘Ōlelo: ‘elima”
My American Crown
Reading Celan at the Liberation War Museum
Love in a Time of Climate Change
Lacing: XII
from “Boy Corona”: Crucifying
The Alien Crown (The conquerers came and wrote the conquered into being)
African american literature
Ars Poetica or Sonnet to Be Written across My Chest & Read in a Mirror, Beginning with a Line from Kimiko Hahn
Essays
The National and Global Sonnet
Jahan Ramazani | Self-Metaphorizing “American” Sonnets
Benjamin Crawford | The Rising Poems of America: Nationalistic Origins of the American Sonnet
John James | Origins of Rupture: Emerson, Wheatley, and the Early American Sonnet
Gillian Huang-Tiller | E. E. Cummings: The Iconic Metasonnet and the Cultural Emblem of the American “i/Eye”
Timo Müller | Sonnets into the American: Translation and Transnation in the Harlem Renaissance
Walt Hunter | Claude McKay’s Lonely Planet: The Sonnet Sequence and the Global City
Matthew Kilbane | John Wheelwright, Sound Engineer
Donna Denizé | The Resonances of McKay’s Sonnet Voice, Then and Now
Whose Sonnet?
Carl Phillips | Whose Sonnet? (A Transgression)
Nathan Spoon | The Sonnet As: Neuroqueerness in the American Sonnet
Ariel Martino | “From the you to me”: Interpersonal Exchange in Margaret Walker’s For My People Sonnet Sequence
Lisa L. Moore | The Sonnet Is Not a Luxury
Jodie Childers | Mapping Radical Poetic Geographies: The Sonnets of Frank X Walker and Maggie Anderson
Michael Dumanis | Subverting the Tradition in The Tradition: Jericho Brown’s Reconceptualization of the Sonnet
Meg Day | Deafing the Sonnet
Wrestling with the Language and Tradition
Hollis Robbins | Wrestling with the Language: Dialect and Form in Paul Laurence Dunbar
Zoë Pollak | Sensuous Waste in the Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
Jonathan F. S. Post | Frost in the Company of Shakespeare and Wordsworth
Michael Theune | Strange Voltas
Lesley Wheeler | Partial Visibility: Short-Lined Sonnets
Nate Mickelson | Sonnets and/as Boxes: Ken Taylor, Joseph Cornell, and the New Lyric Studies
Rebecca Morgan Frank | Standing in One Place to Move: The Repeated-Line Sonnet
Anna Lena Phillips Bell | “This resonant, strange, vaulting roof”: Contemporary Sonnets beyond Iambic Pentameter
Diana Leca | Kay Ryan’s Miniature Sonnets
Marlo Starr | Restaging the American “Freakshow” in Olio: Tyehimba Jess’s Syncopated Sonnets
Home, Interiority, Intimacy
Stephen Regan | Broken Hearts and Broken Homes: The Desolation of the American Sonnet
Eleanor Wakefield | Helene Johnson’s “Barbaric Songs,” “Choked”
Tess Taylor | But Could a Dream: Form and Freedom in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Domestic Sonnets
Jon Woodson | Gwendolyn Brooks’s Esoteric Sonnet “A Lovely Love” as an Alchemical Metatext
Anna Maria Hong | Three Mothers, Two Eves: Female Virtuosity and Outrage in the American Sonnet
Jordan Finkin | A Plummy Sonnet by Mani Leyb
Abdul Ali | Eulogizing a Generation in Elizabeth Alexander’s “When”
Yuki Tanaka | Animals and the Self in Henri Cole’s Middle Earth
Acknowledgments
Index