Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I. Shorter Essays -- 1. Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded -- 2. Poetry and Identity -- 3. Kinky Quatrains: The Making of Muse & Drudge -- 4. Telegraphs from a Distracted Sibyl -- 5. If Lilies are Lily White: From the Stain of Miscegenation in Stein's "Melanctha" to the "Clean Mixture" of White and Color in Tender Buttons -- 6. Nine Syllables Label Sylvia: Reading Plath's "Metaphors" -- 7. Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem: Wislawa Szymborska in the Dialogue of Creative and Critical Thinkers -- 8. Theme for the Oulipians -- 9. When He Is Least Himself: Paul Laurence Dunbar and Double Consciousness in African American Poetry -- 10. Truly Unruly Julie: The Innovative Rule-Breaking Poetry of Julie Patton -- 11. All Silence Says Music Will Follow: Listening to Lorenzo Thomas -- 12. The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Stretching the Dialogue of African American Poetry -- II. Longer Essays -- 13. African Signs and Spirit Writing -- 14. Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved -- 15. Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness -- 16. Phantom Pain: Nathaniel Mackey's Bedouin Hornbook -- 17. A Collective Force of Burning Ink: Will Alexander's Asia & Haiti -- 18. Incessant Elusives: The Oppositional Poetics of Erica Hunt and Will Alexander -- III. Interviews -- 19. "The Solo Mysterioso Blues": An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Calvin Bedient -- 20. An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Daniel Kane -- 21. An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Elisabeth A. Frost -- 22. An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Cynthia Hogue -- 23. "I Dream a World": A Conversation with Harryette Mullen by Nibir K. Ghosh -- Bibliography.