Broken Souths

Broken Souths offers the first in-depth study of the diverse field of contemporary Latina/o poetry. Its innovative angle of approach puts Latina/o and Latin American poets into sustained conversation in original and rewarding ways. In addition, author Michael Dowdy presents ecocritical readings that foreground the environmental dimensions of current Latina/o poetics. Dowdy argues that a transnational Latina/o imaginary has emerged in response to neoliberalismthe free-market philosophy that underpins what many in the northern hemisphere refer to as globalisation. His work examines how poets represent the places that have been broken by globalisations political, economic, and environmental upheavals. Broken Souths locates the roots of the new imaginary in 1968, when the Mexican student movement crested and the Chicano and Nuyorican movements emerged in the United States. It theorises that Latina/o poetics negotiates tensions between the late 1960s oppositional, collective identities and the present days radical individualisms and discourses of assimilation, including the post-colonial, post-national, and post-revolutionary. Dowdy is particularly interested in how Latina/o poetics reframes debates in cultural studies and critical geography on the relation between place, space, and nature. Broken Souths features discussions of Latina/o writers such as Victor Hernndez Cruz, Martn Espada, Juan Felipe Herrera, Guillermo Verdecchia, Marcos McPeek Villatoro, Maurice Kilwein Guevara, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Jack Ageros, Marjorie Agosn, Valerie Martnez, and Ariel Dorfman, alongside discussions of influential Latin American writers, including Roberto Bolao, Ernesto Cardenal, David Huerta, Jos Emilio Pacheco, and Ral Zurita.