Poetry and Heresy

In these essays, Joe Safdie seeks "an expanded notion of the secular, one that contains its own transcendence and deserves the honorific of heresy." A passionate, deeply informed critic of Olson and Dorn, a writer who, like his heroes, offers a"constant argument against the calcified and traditional academic notions" of poetic and religious dogma, Safdie is required reading for anyone concerned with the poetics of the New Americanists, or for anyone engaged in thinking through the relationship of poetic and religious sensibilities in our time. -Norman Finkelstein Is there an outside to surveillance capitalism? To media-speak? To present presentism? To reality that is whatever power says it is? What does "outside" even mean when everywhere and nowhere seem to be interchangeable? In Poetry and Heresy, Joe Safdie traces a genealogy of "deviant insiders" ("heretics") who have worked the language to hold what he calls "embedded cognition"-thought charged with attention to chance, circumstance, and history.