Radical Tenderness

Book excerpt: Radical Tenderness argues for the importance of poetry in negotiating political and social catastrophes, through a focus on the unusual intimacies of committed writing. How do poets negotiate between the personal and the public, the bedroom and the street, the family and class or communal ties? How does contemporary lyric, with its emphasis on the feelings and perceptions of the individual subject, speak to moments of shared crisis? What can poetry tell us about how care shapes our experiences of history? How do the intimacies found in protest, on strike, in riots, and in spaces of oppression, transform individual lives and political movements? Through a series of focussed readings of four twenty-first century poets - Caleb Femi, Bhanu Kapil, Juliana Spahr and Anne Boyer - Radical Tenderness reflects the perspectives provided by intimate poetries on the shared political emergencies of poverty, war, ecological catastrophe, racism, and illness.