Will Alexander’s Poetics

Joshua Schuster is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, Canada. His research and teaching interests cover poetics, theory, and environmental ideas. Most recently, Schuster has published books on understanding extinction (What Is Extinction? A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals, 2023) and existential risk (Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk, co-written with Derek Woods, 2021). He teaches courses on environmental literature, contemporary philosophy, poetry, and American literature.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. A Glossary of Glossolalia: The Syntactic Conservation of Energy in Alexander’s Prose.- 2. Will in the Wilderness: Language and Ecology in Will Alexander’s ‘The Stratospheric Canticles’.- 3. Diffractive Index: Will Alexander’s Iridescent Method.- 4. Will Alexander’s Surreal Song: Improvisation and the Politics of Epic.- 5. ‘Not subject to being object’: Questioning Calculation in Will Alexander’s ‘The Congo’.- 6. Faunal Communities.- 7. The Poetics of Plenitude.- 8. ‘There Are No Nouns to Ensnare Me:’ Decolonization of Identity in Will Alexander’s Poetics.- 9. Divine Blue Light.- 10. Momentary Weather Systems and Cosmological Climates.- 11. Alexander’s Archives.- 12. Poet’s Roundtable.-13. Conclusion: Interview between Will Alexander and Joshua Schuster. 14. Alexander, ‘The Sand Genie’.