“Archaeopoetics digs down into postwar poets’ use of archaeology as a poetic model and method. Mandy Bloomfield’s brilliant readings of Susan Howe, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maggie Sullivan, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Kamau Brathwaite brush history the wrong way by exposing, through their poetry, the materiality of documents, runes on stones, legal cases, and chronicles through which lost voices may speak again. In addition to being a major contribution to historical poetics, Archaeopoetics also rubs the aesthetic the wrong way by returning to a discourse forged in disinterested appreciation the phenomenological and ‘lived’ experience of historical actors. If the modernist mantra was ‘make it new,’ perhaps in the light of Bloomfield’s important scholarship, poets have revised it to read, ‘make the old news.’”
—Michael Davidson, author of Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, and Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics
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“In Archaeopoetics, Mandy Bloomfield outlines a long-overlooked aspect of modern and contemporary poetry: its historicism. Her approach to visuality, especially in texts where it is more muted, has the potential to significantly influence future scholars.”
—Sarah Dowling, author of DOWN and Security Posture
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