Poetics

Abstract

This review examines three books published in the field of poetics in 2020: Candice Amich’s Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas; Ren Ellis Neyra’s The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics; and Anthony Reed’s Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. I show that these three books, which discuss poetry in connection with other art forms, each call for a reordering of the senses through which we perceive and analyze poetry (and other texts). While Ellis Neyra advocates multisensorial listening and Reed calls for a mode of listening attentive to what remains unnamed within current perceptual and political schema, Amich shows the importance of paying attention to the embodied rhythms and tactility of poetry and performance texts. For all three authors, these alternatives to individualized, detached, and indeed deadened linguistic contemplation proffer strategies for remaking not only common sense, but the common itself. The chapter is structured under the following headings: 1. Introduction; 2. Poetics; 3. Sensoria; 4. Politics.