Contemporary Visual Poetry: Women Writing the Posthuman

by Fiona Becket

Overview

This book examines contemporary visual poetry and how conceptual writing, poem-objects, and computational texts shape a posthumanist understanding which is “situated”. First, the eye is theorised with respect to ethical understanding. When visual poets reclaim vision, visual poetics becomes feminist praxis. In Paula Claire and Maggie O’Sullivan “vispo” becomes an ecological practice concerned with connectivity in the entanglements of natureculture. In O’Sullivan, Campanello, Bergvall, and Philip spatial and temporal sense (de)formation sustains radical forms of voicing and eyewitness. Finally, works by Mez Breeze and Stephanie Strickland expand our understanding of visual poetry in digital (electronic, VR and AI) contexts in which technology and affect are intimately connected. These visual texts open up Braidotti’s question with respect to how we are to “visualize the subject as a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language”.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040308370
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/19/2025
Series:	Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256

About the Author

Fiona Becket is Professor of Contemporary Poetics in the School of English, University of Leeds. She has written books and articles on aspects of modernist literature, visual poetry and poetics.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Chapter 1 Introduction Reclaiming Vision

Chapter 2 Textual Bodies: Visual Poetry as Feminist Praxis

Chapter 3 The “Multiple Body”: Visual Poetry’s Natural Histories

Chapter 4 Eye Witness and the Curated Language of Others

Chapter 5 Computational Environments and the Extended Poet

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Contemporary Visual Poetics not only offers an important rethinking of the history of “extended poetics,” as its author Fiona Becket names it, but breaks essential new ground across technologies which many critics still feel unsure of how to read. This book provides a vocabulary and a profound understanding of “posthuman” existence played out in the avant-garde poem, mapping new ways that such work is impacting its society and environment. Becket's connection of her core investigation to ecocritical thinking – and therefore our current (we hope not final) emergencies – also makes this intervention timely, even urgent.

—Romana Huk, Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame, USA

From the Publisher