Julia Bloch, <i>Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem</i>

Near the beginning of Lyric Trade, Julia Bloch explains that this book will not offer a new theory of lyric.Instead, Lyric Trade focuses on particular poems' "machinations around lyric" (12), on how they "use lyric to shore up histories and politics of the subject" (7).The five postwar works Bloch examines are not themselves immediately recognizable as lyric, or at least not mainly lyric.Rather, the basic common ground is that they are long: Gwendolyn Brooks's Annie Allen (1949), H.D.'s Helen in Egypt (1961), Lorine Niedecker's "Paean to Place" (1968), Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette (1996), and Myung Mi Kim's Civil Bound (2019).Bloch shows how-even amid epic or experimental poems, two of lyric's customary opposites-each of these writers nevertheless works with and against aspects of lyric.They use lyric to expose and rethink relations between selfhood, language, and political systems.And although Bloch does declare that she is not attempting to redefine or historicize the lyric, her intricate, generative readings invite further thinking about how we might approach lyric and genre even more widely.