Obscenity and Disruption in the Poetry of Dylan Krieger

Obscenity and Disruption in the Poetry of Dylan Krieger is the first full-length study of the radical poetry of Baton Rouge-based poet Dylan Krieger. Wickedly smart, iconoclastic, daring in their critiques of religion and contemporary culture, Krieger's poems rank with Allen Ginsberg's and Adrienne Rich's as the most provocative and avant-garde of any recent generation. With its debt to third-wave feminism and the "Gurlesque," Krieger's work nevertheless moves outward and backward across the landmines of sexual precocity and religious fundamentalism and across the entire western project of epistemology as Krieger came to understand it at the University of Notre Dame. Though this book necessarily stays close to Krieger's specific poems, it follows her lead in stretching her cultural, sexual, and religious furies to their apotheosis in a manifesto of liberation.

Thomas Simmons received his PhD in English in 1988 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked primarily with future poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Simmons taught for four years at MIT before spending 24 years on the faculty of the University of Iowa. Now an independent scholar and poet, he has published three prior books of scholarship, four books of creative nonfiction, and three collections of poetry. He lives in Grinnell, Iowa.