Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics by Heather Milne (review)

Heather Milne’s Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics argues that “experimental and innovative” poetry by Canadian and American women published in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century takes seriously the potential for poetry to be a site for political engagement and protest (p. 11). Milne suggests that conceptual or procedural, appropriative, erasure, collage, and documentary poems all perform “complex forms of [political] critique” through their forms and composition strategies (p. 5).What distinguishes this body of work in particular, Milne argues, is its investment in matter and mattering; innovative feminist poetry foregrounds the body and material environments often through the materiality of language itself.

Milne makes the point that while a Canadian feminist poetics movement emerged in the 1980s, Canadian women’s poetry of recent decades has been largely overlooked by critics. Today, both Canadian and American women’s experimental poetry “circulate and function transnationally” (p. 27). Canadian poetry in particular has committed itself to tracking global capitalism’s transnational flows of information, commerce, and migration and, moreover, “reject[s] the nation as a colonial construct” (p. 26). Thus, Canadian and American women’s poetry should be read together. This poetry requires a transnational literary critical approach, Milne argues, but one that accounts for how the countries “have distinct histories of settlement, colonization, and independence as well as distinct systems of governance and democracy” (p. 198). Throughout the book, Milne models what such an approach to feminist poetics might look like. Notably, she decenters poetry by United States authors from the outset; five of the six poets Milne discusses in part one are Canadian.

Milne’s chapters provide detailed, careful readings of “experimental” texts. By attending closely and facilitating greater access to contemporary forms of poetry by women that have been marginalized in the United States especially, Milne extends the literary critical tradition of scholars such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Lynn Keller, who have taken seriously the project of reading twentieth and twenty-first century women’s poetry for its form, as opposed to reading for its content exclusively. Throughout Poetry Matters, Milne applies language and concepts from an eclectic group of contemporary theorists—including Rosi Braidotti, Jodi Dean, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Timothy Morton, Ann Cvetkovich, and Sara Ahmed—to illuminate the poetry. But some of her sharpest insights are those she arrives at through her own skillful close readings. For example, in a discussion of Margaret Christakos’s What Stirs (2008), which critiques the fetishization of the maternal body, Milne shows how the poet uses fragmentation, repetition, and wordplay to convey the ways in which primary attachments, especially the attachment to the mother’s breast, condition “a dialectic of gratification and frustration” that also characterizes the “insatiable drives” of contemporary capitalism (p. 57).

Poetry Matters is organized into three two-chapter sections. This structure adds to the book’s accessibility and navigability. In part one, “Economies of the Flesh and Word: Biopolitics and Writing the (Posthuman) Body in Late Capitalism,” Milne explores how Jennifer Scappettone, Larissa Lai and Rita Wong, Margaret Christakos, Nikki Reimer, and Rachel Zolf use “strategic embodiment” to critique neoliberal, biopolitical, and late capitalism (Milne invokes all three) (p. 47). Part two, “Poetic Matterings: New Materialist and Posthuman Feminist Ecopoetics,” considers how the New Materialist “ecopoetics” of Yedda Morrison, Marcella Durand, Rita Wong, and Evelyn Reilly decenter human agency in the process of reimagining the material world. Part three, “Geopolitics, Nationhood, Poetry,” reads Juliana Spahr’s, Claudia Rankine’s, and Dionne Brand’s post-9/11, post-United States-invasion-of-Iraq poetry. Then it turns to poems by Rachel Zolf, Jena Osman, and Jen Benka, which challenge national and colonial discourses and identities. All of the poets in this part, Milne argues, mobilize documentary...