“Hauntological Poetics: Early American Historical Documents in Contemporary Poetry” (Dissertation)

Poets, scholars and critics have noticed that contemporary American poetry seems defined in part by an obsession with history and the archive (Dowdy, Leong, Skillman). As part of a broader discourse on this historical turn, this dissertation studies 21st century poetry that uses language from early American historical documents: M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! (2008), Kiki Petrosino's Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013), Layli Long Soldier's Whereas (2017) and Quenton Baker's ballast (2023). Through these case studies, I theorize a genre of "hauntological poetry” (using Derrida's portmanteau) in terms of its engagement with material forms of historical knowledge (e.g. textual archives) as well as more immaterial affective and temporal experiences of historical ghosts and memories that haunt the present. While recent accounts of "documental poetry" or "archaeopoetics" by Michael Leong and Mandy Bloomfield have begun to define the generic characteristics and affordances of poems that use historical documents, I utilize spectral theory from Avery Gordon and Christina Sharpe to distinctly argue for this genre’s power to affectively and temporally re-orient the reader through haunting.

“Poetics of Tactile Text/iles” (MFA Thesis)

This critical essay examines the political and social significance of tactility and textile arts as modalities for poetry.

“Hauntological Poetry: Conjuring the Past in Zong! and ballast.”

Forthcoming in Global Nineteenth-Century Studies (peer reviewed).

This article defines the subgenre of “hauntological poetry” as poetry that repurposes language from historical documents to explore the temporal, social, linguistic and/or affective relations between past and present. This article uses as its two examples M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Quenton Baker’s ballast, two books of poetry that reconsider the spectral traces within governmental documents regarding violent events on slave ships in the Caribbean. This paper argues that these hauntological poems fold the past into the present, evoking an oceanic sense of “residence time” (Sharpe) by way of a historicism that is not quite melancholic, but still affectively invested in the obscured violences of enslavement that continue to haunt the present.

“Reparative Re-Composition: Redirected Historical Language in Hymn for the Black Terrific.”

Forthcoming in Modern Language Studies (peer reviewed).

In recent years, poets have turned to archival documents to illuminate the historical present of race, gender and nation — erasing, appropriating and redirecting historical language into original poems. But what is the affective relation between a historical document and a poem which adopts, adapts or erases its text? Moreover, what relation between past and present is established by this form of poetry? In this paper, I take as my case study Kiki Petrosino’as Hymn for the Black Terrific to argue that redirected archival language can be used to not only bring the past into the present in a hauntological relation, but further to reparatively construct possibilities for “black aliveness” (Kevin Quashie). Petrosino uses a “golden shovel” form to intersplice Thomas Jefferson’s racist description of Black bodies with her own vivid self-portrait of Black femininity, at once studying how Jefferson contributed to the construction of black femininity as monstrous (Hortense Spillers), while also repurposing his language to (re)construct “Her secret / name. Her holy shape.” Drawing on affect theory (Eve Sedgwick), Black humanisms (Spillers; Quashie), I argue that a poetics of “redirected language” (Reed), as demonstrated by Petrosino, may reveal the lingering presence of historical violence in the historical present, while reparatively redirecting such violent discourse into insurgent forms of life.

“Intimacy of the Text(ile): The Affective Politics of Touching Textile Poems.”

Conference Paper. Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference, forthcoming January 2026. Toronto, Canada.

When I pull out my quilt, I am compelled to run my fingers over bumpy stitches that were painstakingly crafted by my mother’s own hands. Textiles demand touch, and thereby invite an intimacy with the body (Pennina Barnett), reflecting the relational power of touch to mediate the processual body in the political world (Erin Manning). How, then, might textile tactility mediate textual reception?

In this paper, I consider a niche genre: poems composed in/as textiles. While many books have a cloth cover or sewn signatures, I focus on poetry that incorporates textile elements into its textual and visual composition: Jen Bervin’s book of sewn erasure poem, The Desert (2008), and Layli Long Soldier’s star quilt poems “Mosquitoes” and “Obligations” (2017), cotton paper pieces sewn with wire. I analyze the multi-sensual experience of reading poetic text while viewing and touching textile. In particular, I argue that these textile-poems construct and reflect relational forms (viewer to landscape, citizen to country, reader to poet) through the poems’ text and the textile’s implicit intimacy with the reading body.

In the last two minutes of my presentation, I connect this scholarship to my own creative praxis: an ongoing series of knit, woven and embroidered poems.

"Repurposing Historical Language for Reparative Queer Temporality in Jos Charles’ Feeld”

Conference Paper. Panel on “Queer Reading, Queer Receptions.” Modern Language Association Conference, forthcoming January 2026. Toronto, Canada.

“Hauntological Poetry: Performative, Affective and Epistemological Affordances and Limitations”

Conference Paper. Panel on “Memory and Loss in Contemporary North American Documental Poetry.” Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference, forthcoming November 2025. San Francisco, CA.

“Contemporary Projective Verse: Politicizing Breath and Field.”

Conference Paper. Panel on “Forwarding Black Mountain Poetry.” American Literature Association (ALA) Conference, May 24, 2025. Boston, MA.

“Hauntological Poetry: Séance & Exorcism in Philip’s Zong! and Petrosino’s Hymn for the Black Terrific”

Conference Paper. American Literature Association (ALA) Annual Symposium on American Poetry, November 8, 2024. Santa Fe, NM.

“Languaging the Body in History: Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas”

Conference Paper. Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference, October 28, 2023. Portland, OR.

“Tactility, Landscape and the Colonial American West in Jen Bervin’s The Desert”

Conference Paper. Post-45 Graduate Symposium, March 31, 2023, English Department, University of Washington. Seattle, WA.

“Redirected Language as Reparative Approach to Canon in Hymn for the Black Terrific”

Conference Paper. Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Conference, March 22, 2023, English Department, University of Buffalo. Niagara, NY.

“Ekphrasis and the Imagination: The Material and Phenomenal Double-Life of Images in Adam Vines’ Out of Speech”

Conference Paper. How to Do Things with Worlds, Graduate Student Conference, April 17, 2021, English Department, Indiana University. Virtual.