Breaking from half a century of postmodernist readings of poetry, and bypassing the false divide between formalist and historicist criticism, these essays chart a path toward a new Marxist poetics.

In these innovative essays on poetry and capitalism, collected over the last fifteen years, Christopher Nealon shines a light on the upsurge of anticapitalist poetry since the turn of the century, and develops fresh ways of thinking about how capitalist society shapes the reading and the writing of all poetry, whatever its political orientation.