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We are currently experiencing a planetary crisis that will lead, if worst comes to worst, to the end of the entire world as we know it. Several feminist scholars have suggested that if the Earth is to stay livable for humans and nonhumans alike, the ways in which many human beings – particularly in the wealthy parts of the world, infested with Eurocentrism, (neo)colonialism, neoliberalism, and capitalism – inhabit this planet requires radical, ethical, and political transformation. In this article, we propose that feminist theory, particularly feminist posthumanities, and Black feminist and decolonial thought, together with creative practices such as writing, have much to contribute to transformative planetary activism that imagines different and other kinds of worlds and futures based on an ethical consideration of nonhuman others and collective caring for the planet.

This article investigates the development of militarism in the Arab Gulf using the militarized representation of the Bedouin and their poetic tradition as a site for its analysis. The article traces the ways in which Bedouin ‘martial masculinities’ and Bedouin culture have been appropriated and transformed by British colonialism and postcolonial nationalisms to produce unusual patterns of militarism within the Gulf. It addresses a gap in international relations and security studies literature, in which militarism is examined through state-centric and methodologically nationalist framings that largely overlook transnational and colonial histories. The article argues that contemporary displays of militarism by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates should be read in relation to how colonialism engendered militarism across the Gulf region through the paradoxical representation of the Bedouin as a ‘martial race’ whose martial-ness was also seen as a security ‘threat’ for the colonial/postcolonial state. Militarized responses and rationalities were normalized within Gulf society through the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype, which served as a timeless and fixed construct, connecting the Gulf’s disjointed past to its present-day context. Significantly, the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype helps foster the belief that stability and historical continuity underpin state-modernization processes in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The article’s intervention seeks to disrupt this continuity by looking at how militarism and its martial constructs created ruptures in state trajectories, using the example of the 1996 coup attempt, citizen revocations, and the depoliticization of the poetic act as evidence for the claim that militarism engenders particular insecurities for Bedouin populations in the Arab Gulf.

The Ottoman defeat of the British and French imperial forces during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, known in Turkish as the Çanakkale Wars, had already shown how the theatres of war would extend beyond Europe. While much of the poetry in English that came from Gallipoli is well known in the Anglophone world, the Turkish poetry from Çanakkale is less well known outside Turkey itself. This article analyses selected Gallipoli poems written in both languages in order to show how they had similar recourse to overlapping narratives of history and myth in their efforts to place the experience of war within a wider transhistorical and transcultural framework. By reflecting on the different uses of this double palimpsest, it aims to show how a transnational and transcultural approach to memorial culture can develop our understanding of how the Great War was written.

Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees is a modernist ‘curiosity’ which remained largely unknown due to the peculiar conditions of its original publication. In recent years, however, it has regained its place within the field of modernist studies due to the efforts of Julia Briggs and Sandeep Parmar. Instead of approaching the poem through established categories of urban representation, such as flânerie, urban phantasmagoria or the urban palimpsest, this article focuses on Paris, then in the midst of the 1919 Peace Conference, as a liminal space and site of Bakhtinian carnival. This framework advances an understanding of the poem as a complete and complex work of art. The article argues that the peculiar structure and formal organization of the poem, and its relation to the reality of Paris in 1919 and beyond, turns the poem into a liminal space of its own, thus doubling the city it speaks of.

With the help of the concepts ‘aura’ and ‘autopoiesis’, the relationship between poetry and natural phenomena can be defined as a ‘translation from nature’. Gennadij Ajgi translates his auratic manner of perceiving into poetry. For him, the poem becomes an epistemic medium transcending the sensory perception of nature for a hidden, spiritual level. Les Murray, conversely, demonstrates an autopoietic understanding of nature: The poet himself becomes the medium of the living being. Christian Lehnert takes up impulses from both orientations. He combines the opposing concepts so that they correspond to the hierarchical levels of his religious and metaphysical vision of the world. The three authors all aim to alter the attitude of humans towards nature through their ‘translation from nature into poetry’ so that humankind will open itself towards nature and raise it from an object which can be instrumentalised to an autonomous subject on equal footing with humanity itself.

This poetic critical autoethnography paper studies my own experiences of disrupted mobility as a Vietnamese doctoral student in New Zealand who was stuck in Vietnam. Through the lens of space and place, I investigate the issues of sense of belonging and sense of place that were reconfigured in different spaces. The article highlights my agency to reinforce and reconnect with my sense of belonging. As the article focuses on immobility, it challenges the mobility bias in international education scholarship, arguing that new forms of mobility can be produced out of immobility and that identity reconstruction can be enabled through respatialization.

In response to anti-Black policing in 2020 that led to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Black children and teens turned to poetry as a means to channel their self-described terror, rage, pain, horror, tiredness, and need for change. Reminiscent of the poetry of the Black Arts Movement and works published in The Black Panther newspaper, these poems, many of which call for a “revolution,” are reflective of young people’s critical engagements with the world and the word. With critical literacy as a framework, I engage in critical discourse analysis to determine how the young poets reimagine literacy as they protest anti-Black policing and racism. By focusing on young people’s own grassroots literacy initiatives, which call for the reimagination of blackness and whiteness, and demand truth, justice, and reimagined futures, I demonstrate how educators can reimagine literacy practices to center students’ criticalities and prioritize racial justice.

Presenting poetic approaches to qualitative inquiry, two immigrant educational researchers from different minoritized communities explore their loss of research participants due to increased state-enforced violence in the context of recent immigration policies (e.g., increased presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in immigrant communities and anti-Muslim rhetoric) through poetic inquiry. Presenting the processes and products of engaging with participant loss through poetry, the authors highlight a theoretical and methodological approach to qualitative inquiry, which works toward building intimacies among women of color feminist educational researchers. On the one hand, this work aims to develop qualitative methodologies that seek to reduce harm and violence and foster understanding among different communities of researchers and their participants. On the other hand, it seeks to illustrate how poetic approaches to qualitative research can be used as a reflexive tool to explore the hidden socio-emotional components of the educational research process.

Almost all of our information on the Ghaznavids comes from two contemporary chronicles (one in Persian and one in Arabic) and a divan (poetic anthology) from the early eleventh century. The Arabic text is the Tarikh-i Yamini written by Abu Nasr al-ʻUtbi, and the Persian chronicle is the Zayn al-Akhbar by Gardizi. Virtually, all subsequent Persian chroniclers drew on the later Persian translation of the Yamini. After the Mughal period, a few used Gardizi as well. In the nineteenth century, H. M. Elliot translated parts of the Persian translation of ʻUtbi into English, which popularised that particular version of events in modern scholarship. This uncritical overreliance on a single source has led to perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of medieval Indian history. I will argue that the version of the Ghaznavid campaigns in ʻUtbi was meant strictly for the court of the ‘Abbasid caliph in Baghdad where a sufficiently learned audience could actually be expected to understand the very difficult Arabic of the text. The Yamini did not simply embellish reality but was actually trying to create a narrative that was in contradiction to and even independent of reality. It was part of a campaign of misinformation to hide the fact that the Ghaznavids were creating an Indian empire both as a network of tributary kings and as an open trade zone ruled by a king of kings symbolised by the elephant.

This article questions the commonplace that Edmund Spenser always depicted Philip Sidney as his poetic authoriser by finding undercurrents in works through 1595 and by reading the Mount Acidale scene in the 1596 Faerie Queene as jettisoning Sidney. This study calls into question the accepted version of Spenser’s role in the historical development of Sidney’s image. It demonstrates that Spenser rethought his relationship to Sidney and reimagined himself as a poet. This study also resolves the disjunction between earlier depictions of Sidney as poet and the Sidney-like qualities of the unpoetical Calidore.

The order, frequency and variety of names given the personified city in Lamentations 1-2 enhances a sense of readerly empathy that the personification of the city imbues. In the first stanza of Lamentations 1, the names for the personified figure are ordered such that the most specific name appears in the description of the most personal violence. In Lamentations 2, the personified city is named with a similar frequency to the violent and angry language used to describe the deity. Combined with an increased use of endearment terms, this violence requires readers to hold together both the violence and the deep relationship between the city and her God.

This article engages Queer Theology in conversation with Naga Indigenous Theology. A Naga folk poem is employed to help navigate the intricacies of indigenous experiences and the questions of sexuality in Naga Indigenous Theology. I do this by engaging both Marcella Althaus-Reid and Wati Longchar in their Liberation Theology and move towards queering Longchar’s theology. Using the hermeneutical lens of Althaus-Reid, I demonstrate that there are possible avenues of queering Longchar’s theology. There is also the prerequisite of a justice lens that demands a deconstruction of the colonial legacy in Indigenous Theology. This article shows that Naga Indigenous Theology rooted in Liberation Theology has a potential to propose a Queer Naga Indigenous Theology.

It is all good to say, that the world is one! Are these idealistic/poetic ideas or could there be psychological pathways to experience oneness as a continuous realisation? This is not a question of philosophy or intellectual argumentation, but a question of living and being. There has been now interest in non-dual awareness in research as well ( Josipovic, 2014 ). The objective of this article is to introduce a radical worldview—advaita vedānta that leads to profound cognitive, affective and behavioural implications of well-being beyond the surface level ideas of happiness. Advaita—which means ‘not-two’ is the most profound and radical of psychological theories Indic civilization has experienced and accepted as the epitome—the crown jewel. The Vedāntic worldview and practice with the background throb of all Indic values—of inclusion, love and truth vests in Advaita—oneness. In popular imagination, it has been both esoteric-cised and yet has remained un-commodified. Contrary to popular ideas that look at advaita as a speculative philosophy, advaita is understood as a rich psychological theory with a basis in cognition, knowing, as well as a living in oneness. The students of modern psychology, especially, in India are left poorer, if they are unable to review advaita and yet study consciousness, which is a booming area of research in modern psychology. Advaita is a continuous living realisation—termed as Jīvanmukti, the Vedāntic ideal of being free, while living. Examining the primary Saṃskrit text—Jīvanmukti-viveka, I describe Jīvanmukti—of living in continuous realisation of oneness, till the body drops down, as stated by the great muni, whose above-mentioned abhyāsa grantha—the application manual, is used across Hindu spiritual frameworks and monastic orders, till today.

The poet Sikhamani is a teacher and a Dalit poet who writes in Telugu. His contribution to the corpus of Dalit poetry in Telugu is significant. Sikhamani’s poetry exposes the hypocrisy, inhumanity, exploitation, atrocities, discrimination, etc., of the caste Hindu society. The Black Rainbow: Dalit Poems in Telugu (2000), a collection of Sikhamani’s poems, portrays the problems of Dalit lives. His use of mythological figures, metaphors, similes, allusions, etc., enrich his poetry. Every poem reflects a protest/rebellious attitude from which the identity of Dalits emerges. He attacks the physical, cultural, social and even literary atrocities perpetrated over Dalits and interrogates Brahmanism.

This article is an experimentation in poetry on the topic of combat and killing derived from interview data. Such writing is called many things, but I named it documentary poetry which, regardless of its origins, is a manifestation of the indeterminacy and autonomy of art. I have taken the words of Finnish military cadets, poetic in themselves, and exhausted the possibilities of translation by abandoning accuracy for the sake of sensual precision. The zealless yet unsettling depictions of combat are reassembled in poems troubling the mystique and exceptionalism of the military while pointing to the fragility of the military itself.

Dante deals specifically with the theme of humility only in the canto of the superbs ( Purgatory, X–XII). Still, the topic permeates the entire poem, from the moment Vergil invites Dante to follow him. Obedience is the predominant form that humility takes in Inferno. In Purgatory, it determines the choral forms of the language (prayer and singing), but it manifests itself most spectacularly in the Earthly Paradise procession, which takes the shape of a Cross, the highest symbol of humility in Christ and of Christianity. In Paradise, it is present in some key episodes (that of Cato, of St. Francis, and Dante’s theological exam). Yet, it is continuously signified in the language of image-symbols’ configuration that the blessed souls take in each heaven. Finally, it is humility that allows the Pilgrim to see God with his physical senses, which provide the lowest and most concrete form of knowledge, and yet the most sublime one.

To open up possibilities in inquiry, the authors write in a manner that extends a lens of postcolonial m/Othering through poetic autoethnography. They draw on the conceptualization of rememory to work with/through memories of their own as mothers for the sake of daughters. Building on poetics of remembering, the authors braid their experiences from Kenya and the Philippines, within remnants of colonialism and its tentacles, inviting the reader on a telling-sharing dialogic-rhythmic-groove that is personal and political and haunting at the same time. The possibilities for transdisciplinary methodologies unfold in the telling-sharing and point to the in-between curiosities of knowing and unknowing. This collaborative and creative (re)membering is an invitation to rememory, to rework the past-present-future, a chance at world-making.

Undertaking a practice-led, qualitative research inquiry, I forged an alternate methodology where narrative inquiry, sensory ethnography, and ethnographically based poetry intersect and open a space “in-between.” I call these intersections between narrative approaches and experiments in ethnography “Sensory Poetic Relationship Mapping” (SPRM). I discovered that metaphorical spaces, places, gateways, sites of inquiry and “counter-factual spaces” can come into being. The process of SPRM enabled “hidden” community-based narratives to be revealed through dialogue, narrative, poetry, metaphor, and handmade relationship maps. As an act of creative resistance, this offered alternate voices to the dominant narratives communicated by interconnected institutions of power. SPRM cracked open the metaphorical landscape in which these marginalized stories had been relegated to the periphery, so they could flow. These narratives rewoven to the center unexpectedly interconnected and revealed new sites for future inquiry.

Much recent commentary on Dante’s Commedia focuses on Dante’s truth claims in the poem. Indeed, Teodolinda Barolini has proposed that “the fundamental question for all readers of Dante’s poem” is “How are we to respond to the poet’s insistence that he is telling us the truth?” I propose that the poem itself gives us guidance as to the seriousness of its claims to literal truth. It does so by actively deconstructing its own meaning at critical junctures. I look at several such moments of deconstruction, but I argue that the first few cantos of the Paradiso in particular provide a reflection on the difference between reality and fiction. Early in the Paradiso, Dante draws attention to the metaphoric nature of his poem and reminds his reader, through his character’s own actions, that metaphor is not reality. In this way, Dante implies that we should not take the narrative particulars of his poem too literally but should treat metaphor as metaphor rather than as mimesis.

This article presents the experience of the workshop Investigar con dispositivos artísticos y poéticos (Researching with poetic and artistic dispositifs), carried out in the special interest group A Day in Spanish and Portuguese (ADISP), in the frame of the Fifteenth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), in 2019. The goal of this workshop was to show the panorama of the uses and implications of the arts, poetry, and narratives as a methodological strategy in qualitative research. The theoretical framework to development the workshop included the poetic inquiry approach and the artistic dispositif. The experience of the workshop shows the social, political, and critical impact of combining art and poetry. This combination allows researchers to go beyond more traditional research practices such as interviews and ethnographies. We hope to contribute to promote these alternative methodologies in the Latin American researchers’ communities and audiences.

This article provides an overview of metaphor theories and research on their own terms, as well as their use in Hebrew Bible (HB) studies. Though metaphor studies in the HB have become increasingly popular, they often draw upon a limited or dated subset of metaphor scholarship. The first half of this article surveys a wide variety of metaphor scholarship from the humanities (philosophical, poetic, rhetorical) and the sciences (e.g., conceptual metaphor theory), beginning with Aristotle but focusing on more recent developments. The second half overviews studies of metaphor in the HB since 1980, surveying works focused on theory and method; works focused on specific biblical books or metaphor domains; and finally noting current trends and suggesting areas for future research.

The rhetorical movement throughout Lamentations 3 is difficult to describe and scholars disagree on how to characterize the acrostic poem. Much hinges on how we interpret the sequence of qatal verbs throughout 3.56-61. Most scholars understand this section as a Danklied, and so translate the qatal forms in the past tense. Another option is to understand the qatal verbs as precatives, expressing a wish or command. However, this is a contested form in the linguistic study of classical Hebrew. Many Lamentations scholars cite this uncertainty in arguments against a precative reading of Lam. 3.56-61. This article builds a fresh case for understanding the precative qatal as rhetorically and linguistically plausible. After working through the rhetorical arguments that support this reading, special attention is given to a recent argument in favor of the precative hypothesis from linguist Alexander Andrason. Brief comments are also offered on the oral-performative dimension of this interpretation.

Using autoethnography to critically analyze personal and cultural experiences, we use the notion of “home” metaphorically through (a) academia—of our traumatic experiences as African American and Latinx women seeking acceptance in academic institutions despite blatant inequities, discrimination, and racism; and (b) intergenerational family and ancestral narratives—of past/present experiences and stories of identities, homes, and borders. We craft transnational and intersectional autoethnographic narratives to illustrate how our perceptions of self as African American and Latinx American scholars have been shaped across research, politics, and digital spaces. We address perspectives of how our past and current institutional spaces created emotional and contested imbalances in our sense of self and in how we defend our work. In our representation of the quest for home with(in) academia, we employ the multimodal lenses of poetry, images, voices, and the theories of Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde to elicit how various expressions of storytelling extend our thinking about qualitative inquiry in today’s society in ways that help to challenge academic and institutional structures.

The metrical theory devised by Eduard Sievers and refined by A. J. Bliss forms the basis for most current scholarship on Old English meter. A weakness of the Sievers–Bliss theory is that it occupies a middle ground between two levels of analytic description, distinguished by Roman Jakobson in an influential article as ‘verse instance’ and ‘verse design’. Metrists in the Sievers–Bliss tradition employ a concept of metrical position (a key component of verse design), yet the focus of attention usually remains on the contours of stress of individual verses. Important exceptions are the studies of Thomas Cable and Nicolay Yakovlev. The theoretical innovations of Cable and Yakovlev, among others, enable a more concise presentation of verse design than anyone writing on the subject has yet offered. The present essay attempts to show what such a presentation might look like, while also giving due acknowledgment to the complexities of position-count in this meter. We presume no prior knowledge of the Sieversian system. Illustrations are drawn principally from Cædmon’s Hymn and the Seafarer.

How might one situate oneself in and respond to research literature in a way that does not assume traditional humanist research paradigms? In response, I engage in poetic inquiry through my readings of certain scholarly articles published in the field of postqualitative inquiry. I present two of them here, based on two articles that strike a rhythm in me; evocations are created and my voice merges with the existing voices in creating further lines of flight. The poetry helps me attune to inquiry and in turn inquiry is revealed as a sensitive attunement to the rhythms of life.

The author uses poetic inquiry as CFIC (critical family and interpersonal communication) methodology to tell a story of cooking, cleaning, and caring for her elderly parents in the house she grew up in during the COVID-19 pandemic for 11 days in March 2020 when COVID-19 lockdowns began in the US. The piece is organized as a series of daily menus, lyric reflections, and narrative poems about family stories, family values, and the enactment of supportive behaviors that detail how a family deals with political differences, identity negotiation, and crisis. The author asks: (1) What does it mean to be a good daughter, and how is this complicated by discourses about the meaning of marriage?; (2) How does one reconcile family differences in political views and hold true to family and personal values?; and (3) How does one decide what obligations to focus on during a moment of personal and international crisis? The use of poetic inquiry shows how public cultural discourses influence private experience.

Ethiopian Qene (traditional and living oral poetry) intertwines biblical interpretation with the observation of nature and critique of current events. It is always delivered as improvisation. It is performed in traditional schools, as well as at liturgical and social events. It contains metaphors, rhymes, and rhythm. It includes important values and is useful for theological studies and biblical hermeneutics.

This work consists of five narrative poems that correspond to five moments, Acts, related to a lesson about institutional racism and White privilege, presented to preservice teachers, via Zoom. That White privilege, White fragility, and institutional racism exist is well established, as is the necessity of commitment to preparing preservice teachers for cultural competence and responsiveness. Therefore, the poetry is presented without a literature review, in an effort to highlight the layered tensions of the author’s lived experience, the precarious positionality of tenure-track faculty, and the potential consequences of choices made, to teach (or not) controversial content.

I present four poems written in response to the U.S. Capitol insurrection. The poems are constructed through fragments of contemporary phrases, words from national anthems and pledges, and word play through spelling, phonetics, and semantics. They produce discordant, emergent sense-making through free form verse composed during a singular crisis of political legitimacy.

This article extends the author’s theory of multilevel grounding in meaning generation from its original application to music to the domains of visual cognition and poetry. Based on the notions of ground from the philosophy of language and conceptual blending from cognitive linguistics, the approach views semiosis in works of art as a series of successive mappings couched in a set of six hierarchical, recursive levels of constraint or grounding boxes: (1) perceptual, parsing the stimulus into formal gestalten; (2) cross-modal, motivating schematic correspondences between the stimulus so structured and the listener’s embodied experience; (3) affective, ascribing to this embodied appreciation dynamic sensations, as in the distinction between tense and lax parts of the perceptual flow; (4) conceptual, drawing analogies between such schematic and affective appreciation and elementary experiential imagery, resulting in outlines of narratives; (5) culturally rich, checking such a narrative outline against the recipient’s cultural knowledge; and (6) individual, adding to the levels above idiosyncratic recollections from the participant’s personal experience. The goal of the analysis is to show that the interpretation of constructs from different semiotic modes (music, vision and language) may rely on the same grounding levels as it ultimately depends on the same perceptual, embodied and contextual circumstances. Specifically, the article uses the system to analyse the possible reception of a section from the romance for violin and orchestra ‘The Lark Ascending’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the painting ‘The Last Supper’ by Leonardo da Vinci and the poem ‘No Man Is an Island’ by John Donne.

The article discusses the morality of W. B. Yeats’ sonnet Leda and the Swan in the context of a widening gap between the sexual mores of earlier times and our own, and whether the poem remains a suitable choice for the teaching of stylistics. I begin by examining stylistics treatments of the poem, and its political, social and artistic context, then move on to consider charges of misogyny against the poem for eroticising and failing to condemn the rape it depicts. To assess these charges I examine other literary uses of the Leda myth both before and after Yeats, including earlier poems which romanticise the rape, and later ones which vilify it. I also consider the implications of my discussion for the teaching of other canonical poems on similar themes. The last part of the paper discusses more generally the place of morality in literature and literature teaching, including stylistics: whether teachers and analysts should promote a moral world view and moral behaviour through their choice of texts and comments on them, or whether there are other valid criteria for selecting and describing a text such as Leda and the Swan. To elucidate current views, I draw parallels with the moral didacticism of the highly influential literary critic F. R. Leavis in the mid twentieth century, and ask whether aspects of his patrician view have undergone a surreptitious revival in some contemporary pedagogy and criticism at the beginning of the twenty first.

Addressing the problem of the prospering of the wicked, Psalm 37 uses a poetic device to enact their destruction symbolically and concretely for the reader/listener in visible and audible correspondence and semantic affinity. A pivotal alliterative word series, chiastic in sound and sense, serves as an organizing pattern to subsume a system of literary devices and imagery.

Exhaustion is not about being tired. It is an intense feeling of restlessness, of insomnia, and awakening when I ask myself: have I exhausted all that is possible? Such a state of restlessness and wakefulness represents a turning point for having enough, and opens for new possibilities to act for social change. This reflexive essay departs from the notion that the language of exhaustion offers a wor(l)dly possibility for social work(ers) to engage in critical analytical reflexivity about our locations of power from the outset of our (g)local environment worlds. The aim is to trace the transformative possibilities of social change in social work practice through the literature of exhaustion (eg. Frichot, 2019 ; Spooner, 2011 ). The methodology is based on uses of narrative life writing genres such as poetry, written and photographic diary entrances between the 4th of April and 4th of June. The essay shows how tracing exhaustion during the pandemic, visualises a multiplicity of forms of oppression and privilege, an increasing attention and relationship to things, and border movements and languages. I suggest that social work replace the often-used terminology of social problems with exhaustive lists to address structural forms of racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, which has been further visualized through death, illness, violence, and poverty during the pandemic. I argue that the language of exhaustion is useful for reflexivity and action in social work practice through the way it contributes to intensified awareness, attention, engagement, listening, and agency to create social justice.

This essay consists of a reflection on how the pandemic has affected my social work practice as a social work professor at the City University of New York, in the Bronx. It describes my thoughts and feelings, and identifies ways I intend to move forward in the coming academic year. It focuses on working through uncertainty by blurring boundaries between traditional practice expectations and practice during extraordinary times.

This poetic autoethnography explores aspects of human contact and communication during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Through a series of poems, the inquiry focuses upon the desire for ordinary interactions and the fear of contamination. The piece stands as a lament, not only for those who have died and have become ill from the virus, but also for the loss of human connection as people practice in varying degrees social distancing.

The time poem in Eccl 3.1–8 reflects a marked structure and progression of themes. These connections suggest that the initial lines of vv. 2, 5, and 8 open their respective stanzas by focusing on a similar theme: war and peace. This thread clarifies the meaning of Qohelet’s enigmatic throwing and gathering stones, activities for which no fewer than nine interpretations have been suggested. While interpreters have favored a reference to sexual intercourse, this view is unlikely. I contend that a preferable solution modifies an earlier interpretation relating the throwing and gathering of stones to acts of wartime and peacetime. The throwing away of stones relates to the demobilization of the military, while the gathering of stones relates to the mobilization for war (1 Sam 17.40; 2 Chron 26.14–15). This interpretation offers a more consistent approach to the themes of war and peace developed in the poem’s stanzas.

In her debut book Dolore minimo, Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto engages in a reflection on motherhood to recount an autobiographical story of gender self-determination and male to female transition. This article explores Vivinetto’s poetry as the retelling of transformative moments in two mother–daughter relationships, which generate a reshaping of life and language. In the book, these two storylines intersect, blur, and even overlap, creating a poetic discourse in which the maternal acts simultaneously as powerful catalyzer and producer of meanings. In discussing how, in Dolore minimo, the relationship of two atypical mothers becomes the creative site of a new possible symbolic order, my analysis engages an atypical approach: it reads Vivinetto’s queer representation of motherhood via the theorization developed by the women of Diotima—including, in particular, Luisa Muraro, Chiara Zamboni, Diana Sartori, and Ida Dominijanni. These feminist thinkers have been generally criticized for reinforcing binary understandings of sex and gender, based on an essentialist view of the category of woman. Yet, what if the feminism forwarded by Diotima, by positioning the feminine as a creative producer and first-person narrator of change, could still offer a productive avenue for dialogue? The article begins with a discussion of Diotima’s key theorizations, which lays the groundwork for interpreting the maternal poetics of Dolore minimo. The subsequent sections examine in more depth how Vivinetto’s poetry has reinvented the figure of the mother as a teacher and learner of new words, and how, through this reinvention, she has crafted a maternal language that knits together new relations of contiguity and change. Ultimately, by redeploying the figure of the mother beyond cisgender norms, Vivinetto’s poetry is revealing the inexhaustible vitality of this character.

The article argues that a critical encounter with pre-modern literatures from the national past is long overdue under the impact of a globalized discourse of sexuality. Its effects are already felt at the level of both pedagogy and literary reading, one reconstituting the other, in the ‘global classroom’, a self-conscious pedagogical space imagined by the new educational policy to bring about a globally accredited cultural homogeneity. The case study comes from teaching erotic poetry at an Indian university, from the joint literary complex of Hindi and Urdu in South Asia, a theme uncomfortably located in national culture not just because of its sexuality but its association with non-national linguistic elements which the article terms ‘Indo-Islamic’. The overlapping of the sexual modern with the Indo-Islamic resurfaces a tension in the nationalized body of literary writing in Hindi/Urdu, the major ‘national’ languages of South Asia. This encounter of erotic poetry in old Hindi and Urdu with globalized sexuality, the article shows, offers a chance to reflect on how literary studies are being reshaped by the assumptions of a monolingual, monocultural global sexuality in our nationalist times.

This article addresses how the poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles enters into a dialogue with the memory of World War II. Poems by Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Sinéad Morrissey are analysed, showing how World War II is a controversial source of comparison for these poets. While World War II provides important ways of framing the suffering and claustrophobia of the Northern Irish conflict, evident differences also mean that such comparisons are handled warily and with some irony. The poems are highly self-conscious utterances that seek to unsettle and develop generic strategies in the light of traumatic suffering. This essay draws on Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, and it also makes use of Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory in order to highlight how Seamus Heaney in particular makes use of the World War II memories mediated by popular culture to respond to the Troubles.

This essay explores the dialectic of form, content and social life in the new poetry of the medieval Sanskrit anthologies. Did the seeming anarchy of content evinced in unfamiliar tables of contents produce genuine newness of aesthetic effect or affect, new possibilities for social value judgement—a critical and self-critical perspective—in response to changing sociopolitical conditions and the rise of the vernacular? Or else did this poetry simply do what it always did best: to be everything for everyone at the royal court, everywhere and nowhere? This article argues that the anthology may have spawned a contradictory dynamic: crafting a new sociological immediacy for the form, and yet reconciling the courtly ka-vya tradition to a future in which it no longer figured so centrally. Finally, in a methodological annex, the aforementioned case study spawns higher-order reflections on the mutual determination of art and social life in early medieval South Asia, and the materialist analysis of premodern cultural form. Thinking through premodern sociocultural change from the point of view of capitalist modernity fundamentally challenges the historical imagination, revealing self-reflexivity as both its first and last resort.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities. Prior to the Trump administration, Title IX has been used as the legal framework for addressing sexual misconduct present within educational institutions. There has been an increase of sexual misconduct nationwide across college campuses further entrenching rape culture. Despite this, Betsy DeVos has rescinded the majority of Title IX protections. As a survivor of sexual assault and advocate, I use autoethnographic poetry as a means of providing counter-narrative resistance to a national epidemic of pervasive rape culture.

The factors influencing poetry’s aesthetic appreciation are largely unknown. Some studies have reported features that affect the aesthetic appreciation of poetry. This study sought to determine which states and traits predict the aesthetic appeal of haiku poetry. We recruited 277 participants to rate 36 haiku on five characteristics: imagery vividness, stimulus valence, arousal, valence of felt emotion, and aesthetic appeal of haiku. Then, participants completed questionnaires that assessed their own traits. We found both valence of felt emotion and imagery vividness generally predicted haiku’s aesthetic appeal; additionally, the influence of imagery vividness on aesthetic appeal was partially mediated by valence of felt emotion. As mental imagery fosters emotional evocation, vivid imagery increases positive felt emotions associated with aesthetic appeal. Furthermore, the traits of visual imagery ability, awe-proneness, and nostalgia-proneness predicted haiku’s aesthetic appeal. This study advances our knowledge of how individual states and traits determine the aesthetic appeal of haiku.

The generous commentaries provided by Acker, Cresswell, Engelmann, and Nassar in response to my article, ‘Climate Geopoetics (The Earth is a Composted Poem)’, point to various potentialities for the geopoetic project upon and beyond the page. In this response, I focus on three threads woven through the commentaries: form, self, and potential.