Ars Poeticas

""Juliana Spahr's Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan Univ., Feb.) ask how one might write in troubled times. (Spahr started by reading Brecht.)""--Library Journal ""Throughout Ars Poeticas, Spahr unpacks the steadily worsening threats of climate change and right-wing populism with humility and artistry. We can't help but wonder what poetry could ever add to the efforts to address them, if not just more lines of poetry. With Ars Poeticas, the answer, despite Spahr's reservations, is a tremendous amount.""--Christopher Kondrich, The Washington Post ""Writing the common from the Emersonian tradition has been central to Juliana Spahr's practice of the past few decades. Her work's discipline is processual, labile, and mobile, like Emerson's, and politically lyrical, like Whitman's after him.""--Lauren Berlant, author of On the Inconvenience of Other People ""Spahr's scenes of pastoral enchantment invoke enduring human fantasies of ecological coexistence grounded in mutual care and protection. Yet if these scenes lay the groundwork for the banishments to come, they also speak poignantly to the psychic need for these fantasies.""--Margaret Ronda, author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End