This collection of essays is the first to address this often obscured dimension of modern and contemporary poetry: the secular Jewish dimension. Editors Daniel Morris and Stephen Paul Miller asked their contributors to address what constitutes radical poetry written by Jews defined as "secular," and whether or not there is a Jewish component or dimension to radical and modernist poetic practice in general. These poets and critics address these questions by exploring the legacy of those poets who preceded and influenced them--Stein, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen, and Ginsberg, among others.

Wallace Stevens' "dark rabbi," from his poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," provides a title for this collection of essays on the "lordly study" of modern Jewish poetry in English. Including chapters on such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Allen Grossman, Chana Bloch, and Michael Heller, this volume explores the tensions between religious and secular worldviews in recent Jewish poetry, the often conflicted linguistic and cultural matrix from which this poetry arises, and the complicated ways in which Jewish tradition shapes the sensibilities of not only Jewish, but also non-Jewish, poets. Finkelstein, described as "one of American poetry's indispensible makers" (Lawrence Joseph), whose previous critical work has been called "the exemplary study of the religious aspect of the works of contemporary American poets" (Peter O'Leary), considers large literary and cultural trends while never losing sight of the particular formal powers of individual poems. In Like a Dark Rabbi he offers a passionate argument for the importance of Jewish-American poetry to modern Jewish culture-and to American poetry-as it engages with the contradictions of contemporary life.

How do poets engage issues of race? This timely collection of essays brings together the voices of living poets and scholars, including Garrett Hongo and Major Jackson, to discuss the constraints and possibilities of racial discourse in poetic language, offering new insights on this perennially vexed issue.

The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory is the first comprehensive treatment of a singularly important American poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Michael Heller (b. 1937) has amassed a body of poetry and criticism that places him in the vanguard of modern literature, and this essay collection provides the first extensive critical treatment of his varied career. This book 's multifaceted appraisal of his engagement with poetry as well as crucial ideas across various traditions establishes him as a preeminent writer among his contemporaries and younger generations, and as a major poet in any era.

Writing Not Writing is both a detailed analysis of four individual poets who left poetry behind and a theoretically provocative exploration of the political and ethical possibilities of silence, not-doing, and disavowal. Reading the silences of George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Bob Kaufman, the renunciation of Laura Riding, and other more contemporary instances and modes of poetic abnegation, Tom Fisher explores silence, refusal, and disavowal as political and ethical modes of response in a time of continuous crisis. Through a turn away from writing, these poets offer strategies of refusal and departure that leave anagrammatical hollows behind, activating the negational capacities of writing and aesthetics to disrupt the empire of sense, speech, and agency.

Walt Whitman has served as a crucial figure within the tradition of Jewish American poetry. But how did Whitman, a non-Jewish, American-born poet, become so instrumental in this area of poetry, especially for poets whose parents, and often they themselves, were not “born here?” Dara Barnat presents a genealogy of Jewish American poets in dialogue with Whitman, and with each other, and reveals how the lineage of Jewish American poets responding to Whitman extends far beyond the likes of Allen Ginsberg. From Emma Lazarus and Adah Isaacs Menken, through twentieth-century poets such as Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, and Gerald Stern, this book demonstrates that Whitman has been adopted by Jewish American poets as a liberal symbol against exclusionary and anti-Semitic elements in high modernist literary culture. The turn to Whitman serves as a mode of exploring Jewish and American identity.

With works by over 100 poets, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry celebrates contemporary writers, born after World War II , who write about Jewish themes. This anthology brings together poets whose writings offer fascinating insight into Jewish cultural and religious topics and Jewish identity. Featuring established poets as well as representatives of the next generation of Jewish voices, it includes poems by Ellen Bass, Charles Bernstein, Carol V. Davis, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, David Lehman, Jacqueline Osherow, Ira Sadoff, Philip Schultz, Alan Shapiro, Jane Shore, Judith Skillman, Melissa Stein, Matthew Zapruder, and many others.