Books
Containing Multitudes:
The Social Logic of Lyric in the Mass Public Sphere
Under contract with the Contemporary North American Poetry Series at Iowa University Press︎︎︎
Containing Multitudes argues that a group of minoritized and social-dissident poets, including Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Bernadette Mayer, Bruce Andrews, Lisa Robertson, and Claudia Rankine, played a decisive role in the articulation of a massified idea of subjectivity and collectivity in post-1945 North America. Focusing on the writing and performance work of these Black, queer, Leftist, and women poets, the book explores how they engaged with new mass-communications technologies in ways that brought to light the hitherto repressed diversification, fragmentation, and top-down manipulation of realms of public discourse. Whereas modern lyric poetry has often been thought of as intimately “overheard” speech, or as the private expression of a personal emotion that nevertheless manages to become universal in the perception of its auditors, I show how this model of lyric became particularly incongruous for minoritized writers in twentieth-century media environments, and how they responded by enacting a critique of conventional lyric that exposes the genre’s embeddedness in a fundamentally exclusionary and classically liberal logic of self-abstraction in public.
Executive Orders (punctum books, 2025)︎︎︎
Executive Orders is a community writing project created and edited by Andrew Gorin and Rachael Guynn Wilson and composed between January 2017 and November 2024. It is a documentary record of the Trump years from the perspective of mostly U.S.-based artists, writers, and anonymous participants in public writing events held at the Brooklyn Public Library and online. It is also an experiment in crowdsourced collaborative making that tells a story about how we can—and can’t—come together to form virtual collectives that may have a voice in political deliberations.
Simple Location (above/ground, 2023)︎︎︎
Someone Like You (Gauss PDF, 2017)︎︎︎
Under contract with the Contemporary North American Poetry Series at Iowa University Press︎︎︎
Containing Multitudes argues that a group of minoritized and social-dissident poets, including Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Bernadette Mayer, Bruce Andrews, Lisa Robertson, and Claudia Rankine, played a decisive role in the articulation of a massified idea of subjectivity and collectivity in post-1945 North America. Focusing on the writing and performance work of these Black, queer, Leftist, and women poets, the book explores how they engaged with new mass-communications technologies in ways that brought to light the hitherto repressed diversification, fragmentation, and top-down manipulation of realms of public discourse. Whereas modern lyric poetry has often been thought of as intimately “overheard” speech, or as the private expression of a personal emotion that nevertheless manages to become universal in the perception of its auditors, I show how this model of lyric became particularly incongruous for minoritized writers in twentieth-century media environments, and how they responded by enacting a critique of conventional lyric that exposes the genre’s embeddedness in a fundamentally exclusionary and classically liberal logic of self-abstraction in public.
Executive Orders (punctum books, 2025)︎︎︎
Executive Orders is a community writing project created and edited by Andrew Gorin and Rachael Guynn Wilson and composed between January 2017 and November 2024. It is a documentary record of the Trump years from the perspective of mostly U.S.-based artists, writers, and anonymous participants in public writing events held at the Brooklyn Public Library and online. It is also an experiment in crowdsourced collaborative making that tells a story about how we can—and can’t—come together to form virtual collectives that may have a voice in political deliberations.
Simple Location (above/ground, 2023)︎︎︎
Someone Like You (Gauss PDF, 2017)︎︎︎