Will Alexander’s Poetics

This volume brings together academic and poetic essays which focus on Will Alexander’s complete oeuvre. The collection explores Alexander’s long career in African American avant-garde poetry, and sheds light on other genres of Alexander’s work in addition to poetry, including: essays, plays, aphorisms, novels, dialogues and drawings. Each contribution contextualizes Alexander’s work in the many traditions and literatures his work draws from, including African American poetics, ecopoetics, post-colonial and anti-colonial poetics, bio and geo-histories, and global practices of consciousness raising and spiritual transformation, among other topics. The volume also includes a new interview with Alexander, as well as one of his long unpublished poems. Alexander’s writings are multi-generic and traverse many fields and states of consciousness. This edited collection thus provides a deep and sustained engagement with Alexander’s work, surveying how it has transformed the landscape of poetics, the avant-garde, and the individual reader.