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Abstract This essay is about poetry, publication, and intergenerational caretaking in the context of a mass death event—the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It reads the work of contemporary Black, queer American poets Danez Smith, Jericho Brown, and Pamela Sneed for their intertextual and interpersonal engagement with queer and of-color literary texts and voices (in particular, those of Essex Hemphill, Melvin Dixon, and Donald Woods) under threat of erasure by HIV/AIDS and its effects and aftermaths. In doing so, it argues that Smith, Brown, and Sneed enact in their writing a political, spiritual, and historical project of recuperation and republication, taking the term “republishing” to encompass varying forms of print, performance, allusion, thematic evocation, formal echoes, and citation. In examining the complex, varied, and cross-temporal processes of poetic and scholarly caretaking and kinship—and of publication, “depublication,” and republication—this essay shows that the imprinting of HIV/AIDS into countercanonical poetry offers a crucial, ongoing, and collective counterweight to prevailing assumptions and stereotypes about the virus and the disease it causes, as well as creating and sustaining alternative sites of memory, mourning, and meaning making.The implications of the kind of republishing that Smith, Brown, and Sneed gesture toward—this way of remembering and reminding others of lost texts and writers—are manifold, if complex and unavoidably constrained, and include new readerships; the preservation of stories, legacies, and knowledge; and the mitigation of Black queer literary losses as a result of HIV/AIDS.

Abstract Rejections are a given in any poet’s career. This essay considers how rejections and the idea of the unpublished fragment might shape poetic form, how practical decisions might turn into aesthetic ones. Both Hart Crane and Jack Spicer had careers among magazines, the experiments of their writing entwined with ephemeral publishing cultures and communities. This essay explores how, through their own distinct experiments with splintered forms of the long poem, magazine rejections also created opportunities in Crane’s and Spicer’s poetry. Both poets turned practical processes into aesthetic experiments, exploring the states between writing, submission, publication, and acceptance or rejection.Yet practical decisions can turn into aesthetic ones. Indeed, the playful tension between practicality and aesthetics sits at the heart of poetic form. Crane and Spicer both incorporated rejections—unpublished poems or poems waiting on publication through various submissions—into the form of their work.

Abstract Daniel Diez Couch’s American Fragments offers a scholarly analysis of the fragment, a mainstay of American print culture in the early national period. In American Fragments, Couch argues that fragments were central to both American aesthetics and American political culture. Insisting that the fragment was an inclusive and progressive form that invited readers to consider the relationship between a part and the whole, Couch shows how fragments helped Americans understand themselves and their place in a democratic republic. Couch’s book is deeply researched, and it provides insightful readings of well-known texts like Hannah Fosters’s The Coquette, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, and Washington Irving’s Sketch Book while also introducing readers to a host of poems and other shorter writings that appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and gift books throughout the early nineteenth century. The original research in American Fragments is engaging, and it is also emblematic of a new wave of scholarship enabled by the widespread digitization of books and newspapers in that it introduces so many new texts that are difficult to connect to existing timelines and canons. In this respect, Couch’s book also reveals the limitations of the monograph as a tool for revisioning our collective scholarly project.[R]ight now, the scholarship pushing us to reimagine our literary past is running ahead of the forms in which it might be published.

Abstract This essay examines two peculiar examples of the unpublished from two eccentric authors: Joe Gould’s fragmentary Oral History (probably commenced in the 1910s) and Arthur Inman’s Diary (the 17 million words of which run from the 1920s to Inman’s death in 1963). Neither of these works can be fully published in any conventional way, and the essay examines the reasons why, looking at the history and myths surrounding Gould’s supposedly multimillion-word narrative, the paucity of extant parts of it, and how its nature and nonappearance have been interpreted by Joseph Mitchell and Jill Lepore, amongst others. This contrasts with the all-too-abundant size of the Diary of Inman, a wealthy valetudinarian whose voluminous writings describe in minute detail his prejudices and absurdities, as well as the stories of the many people he paid to be part of his dysfunctional household and to entertain him. The difficulties raised by trying to publish this strange, vast document are discussed through the example of the substantial selection of it, edited by Daniel Aaron (1985). Concluding considerations include the wider questions raised by these sui generis works, particularly the ways in which they resist traditional critical and editorial categorization.Both texts are impossible to publish in full . . . and possess an odd, fragmentary, but delusive allure as a result: the larger idea of their unpublished works is more interesting than the reality of reading them.

Abstract This essay examines two recent books that each take up the vexed topic bodies of data in relation to literature and race in the US: Richard Jean So’s Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction and Elizabeth Rodrigues’s Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures. Each book, in its own way, asks literary scholars to take the data corpus seriously as both an object and a method of study. While acknowledging that the collection of bodies of data has long been used to efface, dehumanize, and racialize, So and Rodrigues ask readers not to dismiss reactively the data corpus’s potential to also be an unexpected tool for refuting those same naturalized and totalizing narratives. Contemplating, as they do, the unique temporality and spatiality of the accretion of singular points into a collective data, the books explore what a data corpus looks, feels, and sounds like and what it might tell us about the relationship between bodies, books in twentieth-century US literature, and the stories that have and could be told about both.Thinking in different ways about the vexed relationship between bodies of data, literature, and race in the US, Rodrigues and So each demonstrate that, while data cannot speak for itself, there are some stories we can neither hear, see, nor tell without its help.