Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women's Poetry

This book supplements existing narratives of feminist poetry by examining how contemporary women poets have interrogated what it means to be public. It draws on recent debates in democratic theory and third-wave feminism to explore the work of women poets as varied as Susan Howe, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Harryette Mullen and Leslie Scalapino. It examines how these poets offer a critique of the normative conventions of U.S democracy, particularly its assumptions about public and private, and use their writing, and its cultural structures, to model alternatives to them.