Transgressive Poetics in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom

Transgressive Poetics in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom is a direct response to the increasing pressure to sanitize or censor curricula that educators across K–12 and higher education face. Each chapter pairs literary analysis with pedagogical implications to argue for the increased use of poetry in the classroom, centering a structuralist approach to analyzing early twenty-first-century poetry in the transgressive classroom as a site of resistance. Transgressive Poetics prioritizes some of the most distinct and pervasive formal traditions in contemporary American poetry: received forms, invented forms, erasure, nontraditional forms, and "unreadable" poems, or poems that resist a traditional or linear reading.

Later chapters delve into recently invented forms like the duplex and golden shovel. Stephens also includes concrete, actionable learning activities for educators who may feel apprehensive about or unprepared to incorporate poetry into their courses. Transgressive Poetics is a timely and necessary addition to broader discussions about censorship, pedagogy, and art as activism that will serve educators at every stage.