Lyric As Comedy

Calista McRae is Assistant Professor of English at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

• Introduction: Consider What That Feels Like1. Comedy in an Age of Close Reading: John Berryman's Dream Songs2. Robert Lowell: The Noise of One's Own Voice3. A. R. Ammons: Comic Badness4. Terrance Hayes: Floundering Interiors5. Coming to Terms with Our Self: Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, Monica Youn

The poets examined are diverse, as are the poems McRae discusses, and gender and race awareness play a significant role in her conversation. McRae writes in a relaxed style with a wit and humor that belies the deep knowledge that informs her observations. A solid resource for those interested in poetry and current critical theory and practice.(Choice) McRae's scholarly exposition of the comic in contemporary lyric is exhibited by her close-readings of poets in the later chapters of her book.(Intertext) Lyric as Comedy is a sophisticated and challenging study that usefully draws our attention to the myriad ways that poets use the paradigm of the conventional lyric as a foil and source of humor, especially in their writing about the self. The book's incisive central idea—that contemporary poems are often funny because they resist the genre conventions and expectations of the form—opens the door to further exploration of the many comic modes flourishing across the landscape of contemporary US poetry.(ALH Online Review)