Publications

Remembering Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1941–2026)

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So this “now”
            now emerges, shadows be-fallen here,
                                               and we debate
                                                           how vast the eulogy we need.

                        —Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The Entanglements: a representation”

The zone between the living voice
and the posthumous voice
is poetry.

                        —Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The moon and modulations of lonely”

I am so very deeply saddened by the passing of Rachel Blau DuPlessis on September 2, 2026.[1] After hearing from her partner, Robert DuPlessis, I found myself weeping in my office for nearly a half hour last week, staggered by the magnitude of losing her. And so I wanted to write a little about how I got to know Rachel and her work, hoping it might provide a small glimpse into just how incredible a person, artist, and scholar/critic she was and the kind of massive positive effect she had on the people around her, even to someone who was only lightly connected to her.

***

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“2025.02,” “2025.04,” “2025.05–06,” “2025.07,” and “2025.11” in Other Rooms Press

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And lo, today is one of those great good days in which I have two publications. “2025.02,” “2025.04,” “2025.05–06” (p. 2), “2025.07,” and “2025.11,” some of my most recent sonnets that most directly comment on this moment we find ourselves living through, just came out in Other Rooms Press. Here‘s a page that gathers the poems together (and then right click the images and open them into new tab so you can zoom in) or else click on the individual poem links above.

“Art Is for Everybody: An Interview with Anna Kornbluh” in boundary 2

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I increasingly think that Anna Kornbluh is one of our most important critics, and so I was overwhelmingly delighted to be able to bring her to Hartwick College to deliver the 2024–25 Babcock Lecture during the 2024 Oneonta Literary Festival. I was also extremely honored that she agreed to sit down with me the next day to discuss her work and career. That interview has now been published as “Art Is for Everybody: An Interview with Anna Kornbluh” in boundary 2 (vol. 53, no. 2; the link to the interivew should work for three months.)


Here’s an abstract of the interview:

This interview with literary critic Anna Kornbluh was conducted on October 18, 2024, in conjunction with her delivery of the 2024–25 Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College. With her most recent book, Immediacy; or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), Kornbluh has established herself as one of the most insightful and important critics of contemporary culture. In this conversation, she reflects on how she came to literary studies, the strangeness of realism, dialectical reading, and the role of style in literary criticism. Kornbluh also discusses political formalism and the value of institutions, the term neoliberalism, social media, the relationship between organizing and literary study, recent projects on climate counteraesthetics and middlebrow aesthetics, and the political realities of late 2024.

In further interview news, I have conducted and am currently transcribing and editing an interview with Paul A. Bové.

And for previous interviews: “An Interview with Jonathan Arac,” “Grateful and Generous Reading: An Interview with Robert T. Tally Jr.,” “Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” and “Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller.”