Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries

Description: Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries offers a collection of nineteen essays that deftly erodes the simplistic distinction between modernism and postmodernism, showing that many attributes of postmodernist verse form not a break with, but rather a continuation of, modernist poetry.

Review Quotes: "In Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries, Mark Scroggins writes deftly about a number of twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century poets and books of poetry in nineteen punchy and insightful essays. Scroggins does an excellent job in arguing persuasively for the presence of modernism in the late modernist "poetries." Although as he admits, the book is neither 'a systematic history of late modernist poetry' nor 'an exhaustive critical analysis, ' it can serve as a useful guide for anyone interested in contemporary poetry."
--Journal of Modern Literature

"Now that we stand in the light of what feels like the last embers of postmodernism, we're better positioned to see what Mark Scroggins has been scrutinizing for fifteen years or more: the poetic monuments of a late modernist aesthetic. Allusive, fragmented, often opaque, these late modernists range from old objectivists like Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen to figures whose creative work is flourishing even now: Rae Armantrout, John Matthias, and Anne Carson, just to name a few. Fluent, honest, and undeceivable, Mark Scroggins is just what a critic ought to be."
--Robert Archambeau, author of Home and Variations, Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry, and The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World