Poems for Near Futures: Speculative Horizons in Contemporary Poetry

Contemporary poetry has cultivated distinctive forms of speculative thinking in an age of climate catastrophe. Recent poems by Evie Shockley, Jorie Graham, Cathy Park Hong, Brenda Shaughnessy, Annelyse Gelman, and Jennifer Foerster develop approaches to near futures as thinkable rather than unimaginable horizons. These works draw on distinctive poetic properties of voice, address, parataxis, and nonclosure to convey ways of imagining future times that resist climate determinism or apocalyptic closure. Such approaches reflect a broad preoccupation in contemporary poetry with reimagining properties of the lyric to configure questions of the social in relation to the planetary.