In Poetry After Barbarism, Jennifer Scappettone argues for nomadic, miscegenated, xenoglossic poetries as fierce forms of linguistic and political resistance. Prodigiously researched cross-cultural readings celebrate a stellar constellation of consequential poets: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, Etel Adnan, and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. -- Charles Bernstein, author of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies Scappettone has gathered a queer family of literary orphans to found a pentecostal, radically stateless poetic nation: a new tradition built on undoing empire, unlearning mastery, and lighting a path through the ruins of fascist aesthetics. In a time of recrudescence, her scholarship shows us that xenoglossia and poetry are not reactions or responses, but rather alternatives to fascism. -- Alessandro Giammei, Department of Italian Studies, Yale University Xenoglossia, as illuminating critical theory and resistant, liberatory poetic practice, feels especially appropriate for our current moment of rising authoritarianism, nationalism and fascism, and Jennifer Scappettone provides an excellent guide through her rigorous, nuanced readings in Poetry After Barbarism. Brimming with insight, politically aware, and written with verve, this is one study that will be as useful to fellow scholars as to poets and other artists in charting a path forward to the future. -- John Keene, Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies, Rutgers University-Newark Poetry After Barbarism, the expression of fourteen years of passionately heteroglossic scholarship, is truly a handbook for the joyous resistance. "Syncretism can only truthfully come to fruition in tumult," Scappettone writes of the wild lexicographer Emilio Villas homoerotic experiments in borderless etymology and liquid tableware, of the milkdresses of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, of the radio conductive junkjewels of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, of the panmusical metavulgate of Amelia Rosselli, of the radical pentacosticism of LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, of the discomposed cartography of M. NourbeSe Philip. In her delicately robust readings Scappettone untethers identity from territory in favor of a translingual propositionthat tumults time is now. -- Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal and Nilling
