Drawing on a long tradition in the African Diaspora of ethical writings that put the Other first, this work shows how black poets writing in an avant garde or experimental vein in the United States push language to its limits to reveal how poetry can address and exemplify ethical postures towards other people.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2:  Other-Consciousness: Toward a Tradition of African (American) Ethics.- Chapter 3:  “re: Source”: Nathaniel Mackey and the African Formation of Ethical Black Modernism.- Chapter 4:  So Far Away, Yet So Close to Home: the Black Surrealism, Negritude, and (Extra)terrestrial (Po)eth(n)ics of Will Alexander.- Chapter 5:  Erica Hunt’s Poet(h)ics of Community.- Chapter 6:  From Slavery to Supermarket: Harryette Mullen’s Empathetic Ethics.- Chapter 7:   Beyond, Between, and Other-Wise:  Mark McMorris’s Postcolonial Poethics.- Chapter 8: Concluding toward a Radical Tradition of Other-Consciousness.

The Other-Conscious Ethics of Innovative Black Poetry is a brilliantly achieved study, one to which future readers will turn often. Not only will this book bring many new readers to these important poets, the philosophical analyses of these works will set the bar for scholars to come. This book is thoroughly researched, original, and, if I may, inspirational. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation This monograph identifies and investigates the ‘other-conscious’ ethics in black avant-garde poetry since the 1980s. Drawing on a long tradition in the African Diaspora of ethical writings that put the Other first, this work shows how black poets writing in an avant garde or experimental vein in the United States push language to its limits to reveal how poetry can address and exemplify ethical postures towards other people. This other-centered vantage allows the poets to incisively comment on some of this period’s most pressing ethical issues, including postcolonial and racialized violence, the history of slavery and segregation in America, and the expansion of human consciousness. The writers involved in this study include Nathaniel Mackey, Erica Hunt, Will Alexander, Harryette Mullen, and Mark McMorris. Grant Matthew Jenkins is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, USA. His teaching and research specialties include twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature, Experimental Poetry and Poetics, Ethnic American literatures, Creative Writing (Poetry), Ethical and Critical Theory, and Composition and Rhetorical Studies. He is the author of Poetic Obligation: Ethics in Experimental American Poetry after 1945 (2008) and has published scholarly essays on poetry in Paideuma, African American Review, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Journal of American Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Sagetrieb: Journal of the Objectivist Tradition, and in Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary.

“Through a deep exploration of the relationship between ethics and poetics, Jenkins devises a new critical methodology for explicating both the aesthetic and formal concerns of a remarkably wide array of innovative Black writers. This study’s focus on empathy, or what Jenkins calls “other-consciousness,” underscores how this group of Black poets fashions a philosophy of community based in imagination, resistance, and hope, opposing destructive modes of contemporary life. The chapters on important though lesser-studied writers Erica Hunt and Mark McMorris set the standard for scholars to follow.” (Kathy Lou Schultz, “Introduction to Claudia Rankine”)

Examines important contemporary black writers who began writing after the end of the civil rights movement Situates their poetry in relevant historical or cultural contexts that illuminate in-depth, real-life ethical issues Uncovers an overlooked ethical tradition within the African Diaspora of putting others at the center of poetic practice

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