The Poetics of Wrongness is a collection of essay/talks that the
poet Rachel Zucker, expanded from lectures presented for the Bagley
Wright Lecture Series in 2016.
Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their endurance, these
are lectures of protest and reckoning. Zucker declares "I write against.
My poetics is a poetics of opposition and provocation that I never
outgrew. Against the status quo or the powers that be, writing out of
and into wrongness." Thus, Zucker deftly dismantles the outdated
paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics.
Bringing Bernadette Mayer, Marina Abramovic, Alice Notley, Adrienne
Rich, Audre Lorde--among many others--into the conversation, Zucker
questions the categories that have been imposed on poetry, as well as a
poet's need to speak, and the resulting responsibilities. Prescient in
their original observations, these expanded talks seek to respond to and
engage the many political events since their presentation, remaining
timelessly persistent in their galvanizing force.