purplish: poetry anger publics

José Felipe Alvergue examines anger in American poetry, while reflecting on the permissible/policed cultural affects of our time. By way of BIPOC and QTPOC poets engaging with negativity—frustration, anger, distress—Alvergue argues that affects that reflect a counternarrative to benevolence challenge the colonial underpinnings of “American publics” as a concept of democratic participation and practice of community. Purple politics play out daily within spaces we rely on for shared comfort a...