Ars Poeticas

Ars Poeticas is a collection of poems in which Juliana Spahr asks what poetry is for in what she calls “dark times”. Its title, meaning “the art of poetry”, recalls Horace’s treatise and the long tradition of poets writing their own ars poetica. The poems weave together ecological crisis, the rise of authoritarian populism and the possibilities of collective care and resistance, tracing a line from the nuclear age and the Castle Bravo test to present-day extinction and political upheaval. Along the way Spahr questions poetry’s social use and whether it is complicit in the systems it criticises.