Showing how poetics provides a path for building new imagined possibilities

Drawing together a robust corpus of contemporary USAmerican poetry, The Art of Breaking Worlds explores social and political breaks: disasters, failures, and disruptions that simultaneously constitute and fracture the world. These breaks range from unsuccessful political movements and acts of resistance to mass incarceration and biopolitical violence, from anti-Black racism to the infrastructural catastrophes of climate collapse. Paul Jaussen shows how poetry responds to such disasters by incorporating public-facing genres and discourses into its literary practice, thereby rewriting into aesthetic form the public languages used to perpetuate or contain that rupture. This poetic integration of public language thus generates a third space, located between the rhetorical and the aesthetic, a literary practice of both world-breaking and world-making that transforms existing genres while also creating newly imagined modes of collectivity. Grounded in contemporary theory and close readings of works by poets such as Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, and Ilya Kaminsky, this book proposes that these dynamics require a distinctive critical poetics, one simultaneously attuned to discourses of struggle and discourses of art, modeling a fresh approach to the relationship between politics and literature.

PAUL JAUSSEN is an associate professor of literature in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication Department at Lawrence Technological University.

Introduction: Break Beats                            
Chapter 1: Making, Breaking, Sense            
Chapter 2: Forensic Poetics, or Investigating Broken Worlds            
Chapter 3: Poetic Love in the Body Politic                    
Chapter 4: On the Poetics of Public Mourning                
Afterword: The Poetic Flicker of Bad Forms                
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index