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 logic of the public sphere.
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)︎︎︎
Poetry chapbook.
The Apologies (exhibition at East Quay gallery, 2022)︎︎︎
The Apologies dramatises issues of blame, culpability, complicity, and uncertainty surrounding the climate crisis. Drawing on research into the historical form of the public apology, this installation represents durable commemorations of apologies not yet given.
Someone Like You (Gauss PDF, 2017)︎︎︎
Conceptual lyric.
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 logic of the public sphere.
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)︎︎︎
Poetry chapbook.
The Apologies (exhibition at East Quay gallery, 2022)︎︎︎
The Apologies dramatises issues of blame, culpability, complicity, and uncertainty surrounding the climate crisis. Drawing on research into the historical form of the public apology, this installation represents durable commemorations of apologies not yet given.
Someone Like You (Gauss PDF, 2017)︎︎︎
Conceptual lyric.
