Table of Contents

Contents Introduction Poems Sonnet III. On the Prospect of Peace, in 1783 To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty. 1768. Sonnet—To an American Painter Departing for Europe Woods: A Prose Sonnet I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing Sometimes I walk where the deep water dips Her Eyes Assurance One Night A January Dandelion Plácido’s Farewell to His Mother Slow through the Dark On the Capture and Imprisonment of Crazy Snake, January, 1900 Electrocution The Matrix Sonnets That Please Hyla Brook To Madame Curie The New Negro “So Quietly” A Plum Sonnet Sonnet America Sonnet I next to of course god america i from “Sonnets from the Cherokee” Roman Fountain Phallus Two Weeks From the Dark Tower Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem Sonnet of Intimacy Sonnet Frederick Douglass The Struggle Staggers Us History the rites for Cousin Vit A Lovely Love This Tall Horseman, My Young Man of Mars moonshot sonnet The Beginning The Feast of Stephen The Broken Home May Morning from “Twenty-One Love Poems” Butchering Sonnet: To Eva Sonnet XXXIV Sunflower Sonnet Number Two the death of fred clifton “Vagina” Sonnet The Eye of the Storm I want this love to be resilient The bride is in the parlor, dear confection MMDCCXIII½ Sonnet (You jerk you didn’t call me up) Say Uncle American Sonnet 18 American Sonnet 79 Tears, through the patchwork drapery of dream I come to cafe, I sit, I bear Sonnet for Her Labor Glass Is Not Crystalline Postcard from Kashmir from “33” Questionnaire from “Salutations in Search Of” The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do Arte Povera Givingly Against Teleology When Millie and Christine McKoy Graveyard Blues from “Four Sonnets about Food” Nude Palette from “The Black and White Sonnet Series” Ismail & Abla to Ahmed, Their Son American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin (I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison) from “Nets” Kiddo Sonnet Done Red from “Toxic Sonnets” Duplex The Tradition from “Ka ‘Ōlelo: ‘elima” My American Crown Reading Celan at the Liberation War Museum Love in a Time of Climate Change Lacing: XII from “Boy Corona”: Crucifying The Alien Crown (The conquerers came and wrote the conquered into being) African american literature Ars Poetica or Sonnet to Be Written across My Chest & Read in a Mirror, Beginning with a Line from Kimiko Hahn Essays The National and Global Sonnet Jahan Ramazani | Self-Metaphorizing “American” Sonnets Benjamin Crawford | The Rising Poems of America: Nationalistic Origins of the American Sonnet John James | Origins of Rupture: Emerson, Wheatley, and the Early American Sonnet Gillian Huang-Tiller | E. E. Cummings: The Iconic Metasonnet and the Cultural Emblem of the American “i/Eye” Timo Müller | Sonnets into the American: Translation and Transnation in the Harlem Renaissance Walt Hunter | Claude McKay’s Lonely Planet: The Sonnet Sequence and the Global City Matthew Kilbane | John Wheelwright, Sound Engineer Donna Denizé | The Resonances of McKay’s Sonnet Voice, Then and Now Whose Sonnet? Carl Phillips | Whose Sonnet? (A Transgression) Nathan Spoon | The Sonnet As: Neuroqueerness in the American Sonnet Ariel Martino | “From the you to me”: Interpersonal Exchange in Margaret Walker’s For My People Sonnet Sequence Lisa L. Moore | The Sonnet Is Not a Luxury Jodie Childers | Mapping Radical Poetic Geographies: The Sonnets of Frank X Walker and Maggie Anderson Michael Dumanis | Subverting the Tradition in The Tradition: Jericho Brown’s Reconceptualization of the Sonnet Meg Day | Deafing the Sonnet Wrestling with the Language and Tradition Hollis Robbins | Wrestling with the Language: Dialect and Form in Paul Laurence Dunbar Zoë Pollak | Sensuous Waste in the Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman Jonathan F. S. Post | Frost in the Company of Shakespeare and Wordsworth Michael Theune | Strange Voltas Lesley Wheeler | Partial Visibility: Short-Lined Sonnets Nate Mickelson | Sonnets and/as Boxes: Ken Taylor, Joseph Cornell, and the New Lyric Studies Rebecca Morgan Frank | Standing in One Place to Move: The Repeated-Line Sonnet Anna Lena Phillips Bell | “This resonant, strange, vaulting roof”: Contemporary Sonnets beyond Iambic Pentameter Diana Leca | Kay Ryan’s Miniature Sonnets Marlo Starr | Restaging the American “Freakshow” in Olio: Tyehimba Jess’s Syncopated Sonnets Home, Interiority, Intimacy Stephen Regan | Broken Hearts and Broken Homes: The Desolation of the American Sonnet Eleanor Wakefield | Helene Johnson’s “Barbaric Songs,” “Choked” Tess Taylor | But Could a Dream: Form and Freedom in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Domestic Sonnets Jon Woodson | Gwendolyn Brooks’s Esoteric Sonnet “A Lovely Love” as an Alchemical Metatext Anna Maria Hong | Three Mothers, Two Eves: Female Virtuosity and Outrage in the American Sonnet Jordan Finkin | A Plummy Sonnet by Mani Leyb Abdul Ali | Eulogizing a Generation in Elizabeth Alexander’s “When” Yuki Tanaka | Animals and the Self in Henri Cole’s Middle Earth Acknowledgments Index