purplish

purplish theorizes poetry as a demonstration of anger, anger as a public archive of profound knowledge. At stake in purplish is remapping poetry’s affective landscape to include negativity––anger, pessimism, nihilism, repudiation, critique, etc.––without surrendering the idea of a public as a dynamic site of relation. Rather than understand anger as an individual emotion, a poetry of anger in America discloses the demos as a site where an alternative, liberatory, and collaborative form of “work” happens. My focus on anger isn’t simply to spectacularize it, but to place it in the context of collective well-being, and mental health care as a public poetics. Or, as a poetics that insinuates a public through a reorientation of time, address, and care. My ambition is that this work pushes through some of the stasis in academic writing, while illuminating contemporary poetics, and mapping a place for a poetry of anger that is as primary and significant as love. 

preoder at University of Iowa Press