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The Missouri Review

Reviews | November 08, 2019

Radical Research and the Scientific Method: Tracking a New Trajectory through Four Recent Poetry Collections

Kathryn Nuernberger

Bradfield, Elizabeth. Toward Antarctica. Boreal Books, 2019. 160 pp. $19.95, paper.

Lee, Ed Bok. Mitochondrial Night. Coffee House Press, 2019. 88 pp. $16.95, paper.

Wahmanholm, Claire. Wilder. Milkweed Editions, 2019. 96 pp. $16.00, paper.

Roripaugh, Lee Ann. tsunami v. the fukushima 50. Milkweed Editions, 2019. 120 pp. $16.00, paper.

 

When Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 classic The Book of the Dead was re-issued in 2018, edited and with a new introduction by Catherine Venerable Moore, it became clear that a major, though under-discussed, Modernist innovation was docupoetics. While many readers struggle to understand how certain racist, anti-Semitic, and Fascist writers could be considered so essential for so long, contemporary poets are finding influence in less canonized poets of the twentieth century whose docupoetic aesthetics are proving to be powerfully resonant for the present historical moment.

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