Voices from four cultures: the poetry of Kei Miller, Denise Riley, Terrance Hayes and Juana Adcock

Contemporary poetry is wildly diverse and deeply engaged with real problems. This course looks at four recent volumes with distinct and crackling cultural concerns -- Jamaican Kei Miller's The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014), catching Western and Rastafarian perceptions that clash with/out understanding; English Denise Riley's Say Something Back (2016), containing the stunning 'A Part Song', an elegy for (the mother of) her son; African-American Terrance Hayes's brilliantly enraged American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), the finest literary work to date driven by Black Lives Matter; and Mexican-Scottish Juana Adcock's linguistic melange Split (2019), seeking as a woman to fuse her Hispanic and Gaelic influences.