The Poetry of Disaster: Chernobyl, Katrina, and the Anthropocene (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Recent news images of disastrous floods, fires and earthquakes vividly show we live in an unstable world. This book examines that precarity through an analysis of how disaster is expressed through poetry. It situates poetry of disaster as a distinct poetic endeavour and as an emerging field of academic research. Focusing on a selection of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry collections responding to notable disasters, these collections are explored firstly, as literary texts; secondly, as case studies into why and how the authors chose to write about these disasters in the way they did; and thirdly, as access points for wider investigations into disaster and disaster studies in the twentieth and twenty-first century. The texts also inform an exploration into the binary of ‘man-made’ and ‘natural’, a binary that stubbornly persists in contemporary representations of disaster, however problematic that differentiation is in this age of the Anthropocene.