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Humanities
Special Issues
Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry
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Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 June 2025) | Viewed by 930

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Ann Keniston

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
English Department, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557, USA
Interests: contemporary North American poetry in its socio-political-cultural context

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This special issue seeks to address a series of related topics and questions in North American poetry written after about 1995, as well as criticism about it.

It seeks essays that consider:

  • a single poet or multiple poets who address hybridity, borders and walls and their breaking down, interstitial spaces, and other modes and places of transgression
  • hybrid identities, especially the condition of being both/and and/or having multiple identifications
  • poems written in hybrid forms, including memoir, documentary, academic discourse, fiction, history, etc. and poems that incorporate visual, musical, or oral elements. Such essays might reassess and update the arguments (implied and explicit) in the 2009 anthology American Hybrid (ed. Swensen and St. John)
  • discourse, memoir, music, oral culture, visual culture and images, etc.
  • the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the notion of hybridity in relation to one or several contemporary poets, especially given its theoretical origin in postcolonial studies and the several (and sometimes conflicting) ways it has been defined.

Essays may range from 4000 to 8000 words. The submission deadline is flexible, but would ideally be no later than 4/1/25.

Dr. Ann Keniston
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • North American poetry
  • criticism
  • hybridity and border crossings

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 1049 KiB  
Article
Ritual and Assemblage: Reading Hybrid Elegy Through Changing American Death Practices
by Anastasia Nikolis
Humanities 2025, 14(6), 127; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060127 - 11 Jun 2025
Viewed by 163
Abstract
In American Hybrid (2009), Cole Swenson describes hybrid poetics as a reconciliation between the two dominant poetic traditions of the 20th century, which might be called lyric and experimental (xx–xxi). More recently, however, “hybrid” refers to any work blurring boundaries between poetry and [...] Read more.
In American Hybrid (2009), Cole Swenson describes hybrid poetics as a reconciliation between the two dominant poetic traditions of the 20th century, which might be called lyric and experimental (xx–xxi). More recently, however, “hybrid” refers to any work blurring boundaries between poetry and other genres. This is most notable in the ever-increasing interest in the lyric essay but also in the constant revision of contemporary elegy as anti-elegy. In Poetry of Mourning, Jahan Ramazani defines anti-elegy in terms of its refusal of consolation and instead its seeking of more melancholic mourning. Subsequently, as noted by Bardazzi, Binetti, and Culler, “Elegy remains a poetic genre and yet, it has also developed a ‘mode of discourse’ that moves beyond its literary borders and finds its expressions in entangled intra-actions between the most diverse range of elegiac objects”. In the early 21st century, hybrid elegy represents the collision of two major changes in American culture: the changing nature of American death rituals and the increasingly intermedial literary landscape. Drawing on examples from Nox by Anne Carson and Ghost Of by Diane Khoi Nguyen, an elegiac version of the hyper-personalized American death ritual is inscribed in assemblages of images and text on the page. When read as a personalized American death ritual, the hybrid elegy materializes its own tradition and poetics, which are expressed in the poetic constraints of assemblage and recognizable in their reliance on elegiac repetition. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)
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15 pages, 219 KiB  
Article
Unbearable Birth: Natality in Louise Glück’s Averno
by Reena Sastri
Humanities 2025, 14(6), 122; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060122 - 9 Jun 2025
Viewed by 69
Abstract
This essay argues for the importance of the overlooked theme of natality in the poetry of Louise Glück. In its guise as mortality, human finitude causes pain through the permanence of death; in its guise as natality, finitude can also be an occasion [...] Read more.
This essay argues for the importance of the overlooked theme of natality in the poetry of Louise Glück. In its guise as mortality, human finitude causes pain through the permanence of death; in its guise as natality, finitude can also be an occasion for wonder at the unlikely chance of having been born, and the contingency and possibility for beginning something new associated with natality by Hannah Arendt and others. In Glück’s work, the theme of natality comes across in poems concerning pregnancy, birth, infants, children, and mothers. Several of her poems feature a hybrid identification as child and as mother, a hybridity that enables the apprehension of natality and that leads to a mode of poetic speech that originates in, and is imbricated with, listening as an alternative to knowing. This essay examines some of Glück’s earlier poetry in these terms before turning to her 2006 volume Averno, which retells the myth of Persephone. Undeniably preoccupied with death, Averno is, I argue, equally concerned with birth, mindful that human finitude itself is double or hybrid. Although many poems cast Demeter as a smothering, possessive mother, Averno, at key moments, takes into account a mother’s perspective as well as a child’s. This hybrid identification gives rise to the emergence of an unexpected lyric voice that both listens and sings. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)
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