1st Edition

Contemporary Visual Poetry Women Writing the Posthuman

By Fiona Becket Copyright 2025
230 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

230 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book examines contemporary visual poetry and how conceptual writing, poem-objects, and computational texts shape a posthumanist understanding that is “situated”. First, the eye is theorised with respect to ethical understanding. When visual poets reclaim vision, visual poetics becomes a feminist praxis. In Paula Claire and Maggie O’Sullivan, visual poetry becomes an ecological... Read more

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Chapter 1          Introduction Reclaiming Vision 

Chapter 2          Textual Bodies: Visual Poetry as Feminist Praxis

Chapter 3          The “Multiple Body”: Visual Poetry’s Natural Histories

Chapter 4          Eye Witness and the Curated Language of Others

Chapter 5          Computational Environments and the Extended Poet

Bibliography

Index

Biography

Fiona Becket is professor of contemporary poetics in the School of English, University of Leeds. She has written books and articles on aspects of modernist literature, visual poetry, and poetics.

Contemporary Visual Poetics not only offers an important rethinking of the history of “extended poetics,” as its author Fiona Becket names it, but breaks essential new ground across technologies which many critics still feel unsure of how to read. This book provides a vocabulary and a profound understanding of “posthuman” existence played out in the avant-garde poem, mapping new ways that such work is impacting its society and environment. Becket's connection of her core investigation to ecocritical thinking – and therefore our current (we hope not final) emergencies – also makes this intervention timely, even urgent.

--Romana HukAssociate Professor, University of Notre Dame, USA