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This work examines the poetry collection Junín (1930) by the Peruvian author Enrique Bustamante y Ballivián (1883–1937). While a part of the Latin American avant-garde expresses a fascination with the rise of new machines in the metropolis, this article demonstrates that Bustamante y Ballivián responds to this trend by representing machinery of a different kind – extractivist machinery – in a different type of space: the Andes. The author also engages with the indigenista avant-garde poetic proposals of his Peruvian contemporaries. Unlike them, the poet does not aim to give voice to the indigenous subject, nor does he idealize or solely link it to nature. Instead, he portrays it as 'coupled' to the mineral extraction machinery. Additionally, the poet depicts this machinery as invasive, contaminating and destructive to the landscape and its inhabitants. This work argues that Junín emerges as the first poetic representation of the ecological impacts caused by large-scale mining exploitation in the Andes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widely renowned and exhaustively researched Kashmiri-American diasporic poet, Agha Shahid Ali, has received acclaim for his portrayal of themes such as loss, longing for the homeland, nostalgia, hyphenated identity, hybridity, and dislocation, among others. However, within the purview of new historicism, this paper intends to examine the interplay of literature, culture, and history. Using Clifford Geertz's framework of "thick description," the paper analyzes Agha's poetry as a cultural artifact with ethnographic value. Through a semiotic analysis of select poems based on Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes, the paper aims to unravel themes of fragmented identity, cultural memorialization, and the preservation of imaginary homelands. The paper also attempts to explore that Agha Shahid Ali, actively engaged with the socio-political turmoil in his homeland. He sought to reconcile the tensions between different traditions and religious communities, envisioning a personal utopia rooted in his privileged position. His poetry reflects his historical context, facilitating a symbolic exchange between the fragments of Kashmiri culture. Through intertextual references, religious symbols, and social emblems, Ali constructs a significant and experimental narrative about Kashmir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proletarian writer H. T. Tsiang worked and lived in the US under the constant threat of deportation since arriving in the country under the Johnson-Reed Act. This article examines a cache of poetry that Tsiang wrote in the Ellis Island detention center from 1940–1941 and mailed to the painter, book illustrator, and author Rockwell Kent. These poems, which are preserved among Kent's papers in the form of a toilet paper manuscript, a make-shift chapbook, and typescript sheafs, were roundly rejected by publishers in Tsiang's time. Yet they speak to his precarious immigration status and his long-term project of constituting proletarian readerships outside US publishing. Tsiang's unpublished poems, I argue, composed a counterpublic of early Chinese American writing that grew from, and responded to, the conditions of exclusion. Having been detained on both Angel Island and Ellis Island, Tsiang was willing to take the "crooked path" into US cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary erasure poetry and the poetics of remediated forms are often taken as serving as political battlegrounds and sites of epistemic transference. At the same time, what is missing from the literature is a discussion of medieval manuscripts and the history of palimpsests. This paper explores two topics: (1) how the Archimedes palimpsest allows us to understand blackout poems as sites of knowledge production as well as conversations between polemic positions and (2) how poetic remediation can inform our valuation of the erasures situated in the Archimedes palimpsest. Through analysis of Travis Macdonald's The O Mission Repo, Rachel Stempel's "Natal Girl (& Other Repeat Offenses)," Molly R. Sullivan's "Levonorgestrel," and the Archimedes palimpsest, this paper explores how both medieval manuscripts and modern forms of poetry serve us as classroom realia, illustrating that their value extends beyond disciplinary boundaries to reveal new ways of conceiving artistic and pedagogical praxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a selection of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938) as postcolonial texts which are rich with postcolonial undertones. Beckett and Darwish articulate a counter-discursive rhetoric that undermines any hierarchically installed oppressive structures. Although political classifications and restrictions limit many neutral inquiries of such texts and hinder objective scholarship on Irish and Palestinian literature, many academic studies on Irish and Palestinian forms of literature have emerged. Counteracting hubristic structures, this paper tackles works from Ireland and Palestine as predominantly imbued with postcolonial implications. The research brings these authors from far-flung parts of the world to address postcolonial manifestations in Ireland and Palestine. Despite their convergences and divergences, texts from both perspectives must be used to critique structures and forces of colonialism in order to further contextualize them within the postcolonial realm. Reading Beckett alongside Darwish helped to solidify the idea that colonialism employs the same discourse regardless of place or time. It also demonstrates that oppressed people tend to employ comparable dissent mechanisms. Much like the speakers of Darwish’s Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, Leaves of Olives, “Mural,” and “My Mother” are always caught up in subordinate power relations, the eponymous protagonist of Murphy is degraded as an inferior other; one who is disenfranchised and excluded both inside and outside Ireland. Both authors refute stereotypes and stigmatization and offer a dissenting paradigm blurring power-based divisions to the status quo that renders the Palestinians and Irish as inferior to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Why does anyone write poetry? Lisel Mueller (1924-2020) was a poet, author, and translator with a long and much-decorated career. She and her family fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and emigrated to the United States, where she would establish herself as a writer. The poem "When I Am Asked" describes the beginning of her journey into poetry, undertaken during a period of grief after the death of her mother. Her writing would come to include nine collections of poetry and myriad accolades, including the 1981 National Book Award and the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Though her ouvre is filled with evocative works, this piece stands out as particularly relevant to physicians and other writers who find solace by expressing themselves through the art of poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a poetry collection titled "Lai mi ka si (I am Lai mi)" by Thang C. Lian. The poems reflect on the author's experiences growing up in Burma and their connection to their grandparents. The author explores themes of home, family, and the impact of political turmoil on their homeland. The poems express a sense of loss, grief, and resilience in the face of adversity. The author's personal experiences and emotions are conveyed through vivid imagery and heartfelt language. [Extracted from the article]