Elegiac Subjunctive, or, Secular Variations on Posthumous Personhood

This essay explores the secular imaginary of contemporary elegy, with a focus on writers in the U.S. Comparing recent poems by Natasha Trethewey, Danez Smith, Sam Sax, primarily, I examine variations in the figure of apostrophe addressed to the dead as imaginative critiques of secular hope. These poets use precarious forms of apostrophe to explore the conceptual impasse of posthumous personhood in a secular social world. Their writing disperses this foreclosed subjectivity across other effects, sites, and practices, as an ethical world-building agency. These lyrical attempts to imagine a secular social ontology of being with the dead articulate powerful possibilities for political justice and passionate attachment.