by Juliana Spahr
Wesleyan University Press
2/4/2025, hardcover
SKU: 9780819501523
Lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism
The 2026 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
During the time of an increasingly powerful alt-right which was also the time when species extinction was ever increasing, Juliana Spahr sat down to read Brecht. She was looking for an answer to Brecht's question about the dark times, about whether there will also be singing during the dark times. The answer that Brecht provides is that yes, that poets will sing of the dark times. In the six ars poeticas that Spahr writes, she sings of the dark times but also of coral, the pop song's possible liberation, and the love of comrades. She writes not only of the rich history of what politics and poetry have done with each other, but what they might yet do together.
Reviews:
"Spahr's Ars Poeticas offer insight into a conversation on and through the paths lyric pushes us to highlight, both light and dark, and how one might best move through it, even across the failures art provides. Can or should art, specifically poetry, save us? Is that even possible? In the end, Spahr's lyric might just be about survival. If we are willing to work for it, of course." -- rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog
"Juliana Spahr's Ars Poeticas sticks an -s onto the title of antiquity's best-known poem-about-poetry, Horace's Ars Poetica (Latin, 'the art of poetry'). There isn't one meditation on the art of poetry here: there are seven, by turns digressive and recursive, self-questioning and self-devouring." -- Christopher Spaide, Literary Hub
"To be falsely comforted by poetry in our contemporary moment does a disservice to both poet and reader. One cannot write away the desecration, the wreckage. Silence, however, is its own form of desecration, and Spahr will not be silent--nor should the reader. The success of Ars Poeticas will lie in the reader's ability to take it into the world, whether through their own poetry or with their own body." -- Jeff Alessandrelli, The Good Man Has No Shape
About the Author:
Juliana Spahr is a writer and scholar of literature. Ars Poeticas received the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her previous poetry collections include That Winter the Wolf Came.