Radical Tenderness argues for the importance of poetry in negotiating political and social catastrophes, through a focus on the unusual intimacies of committed writing. How do poets negotiate between the personal and the public, the bedroom and the street, the family and class or communal ties? How does contemporary lyric, with its emphasis on the feelings and perceptions of the individual subject, speak to moments of shared crisis? What can poetry tell us about how care shapes our experiences of history? How do the intimacies found in protest, on strike, in riots, and in spaces of oppression, transform individual lives and political movements? Through a series of focussed readings of four twenty-first century poets - Caleb Femi, Bhanu Kapil, Juliana Spahr and Anne Boyer - Radical Tenderness reflects the perspectives provided by intimate poetries on the shared political emergencies of poverty, war, ecological catastrophe, racism, and illness.
Elements in Poetry and Poetics, Cambridge University Press, April 2024, 98pp
Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint
Winner of the Truman Capote Award, 2025
Poetry and Bondage offers a new theory and history of poetic constraint. Poets have, for millennia, compared writing metrical verse to being in bondage – chains, fetters, cells, or slavery. Tracing the history of this metaphor from Ovid through contemporary poetry, Brady reveals how it obscures the contributions to poetics of people who are actually in bondage. How, the book asks, does the history and theory of lyric – and of the political freedoms and forms of human being it is supposed to epitomise – change, if we listen to the voices of enslaved and imprisoned poets?
Poetry and Bondage’s innovative approach brings canonical and significant contemporary poets into dialogue across a wide range of historical periods, from Thomas Wyatt to Rob Halpern, Emily Dickinson to M. NourbeSe Philip, and Phillis Wheatley to Lisa Robertson. It also examines the relationship between poetries and sites of bondage: the Romantic poem and the nineteenth-century prison; the lyrics of solitary confinement in the contemporary US supermax; the African-American songs of bondage recorded in the late nineteenth century. It makes a significant intervention in lyric studies and literary criticism, opening up new ways of understanding the foundations of English and American poetry and the possibilities for committed writing today. Andrea discusses the project in a podcast for the National Humanities Center.
Cover image: ‘Memorial’ by Donny Johnson
October 2021, Cambridge University Press, 422pp, 9781108845724
Critical essays
Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
‘Not Yet Understanding’, special issue on Isobel Armstrong’s The Radical Aesthetic, Genre 58.1 (April 2025): 37-52
‘“The wren nesting in the razor wire”: Lyric Containment, Captive Persons and Animal Life’, Differences 36.2/3 (2025): 118-41
‘The Anti-Austerity Poetics of the Archive: Jay Bernard’s Surge and Holly Pester’s Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt-tip’, Etudes Anglaises 76.1 (Jan-March 2023): 47-65
‘Doing Nothing, Including Everything’, Nothing on Atkins (New Malden: Crater Press, 2022), pp. 9-13
‘Sean Bonney: Poet out of Time’, in Writing against Capital: Communism and Poetics, ed. Julian Murphet and Ruth Jennison (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 131-160
‘The Determination of Love’, Journal of the British Academy 5 (2018): 271-308
‘Drone Poetics’, New Formations 89/90 (June 2017): 116-136
‘The Principles of Song: On Denise Riley’, Toward. Some. Air., ed. Fred Wah and Amy De’Ath (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2015), 13-23
‘The Subject of Sacrifice in Proud Flesh and Down to Earth by John Wilkinson’, Textual Practice 28.1 (2014): 57-78
‘Echo, Irony and Repetition in the Writings of Denise Riley’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 7.2 (2013): 138-156
‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Poet’, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, ed. Peter Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 707-726
‘Making Use of the Pain: The John Wieners Archives’, Paideuma 36 (July 2010): 131-179
‘Distraction and Absorption on Second Avenue’, in Frank O'Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet, eds. Will Montgomery and Robert Hampson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, February 2010), 59-69
‘Shadowy Figures in Quill, Solitary Apparition by Barbara Guest’, Chicago Review 53.4 and 54.1/2 (2008): 120-125
‘On Poetry and Public Pleasure: a reading of Tom Raworth’, in Poetry and Public Language, ed. Tony Lopez and Anthony Caleshu (Exeter: Shearsman, 2007), 25-36
‘The Other Poet: John Wieners, Frank O’Hara, and Charles Olson’ in Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New York School, ed. Daniel Kane (Illinois State University: Dalkey Archive, 2006), 317-347; reprinted in Jacket 32 (April 2007)
‘Zero Longitude: Notes on Kevin Nolan’s Elegiac Centres’, The Paper 5 (Oct. 2002): 27-35; reprinted in Necessary Steps: Poetry, Elegy, Walking, Spirit, ed. David Kennedy (Exeter: Shearsman, 2007), 11-27
‘For Immediate Delivery: on the semiotics of blogs’ in Put About: a critical anthology on independent publishing, ed. Maria Fusco and Ian Hunt (London: Book Works, 2004)
‘Grief Work in a War Economy’, Radical Philosophy 114 (July/Aug. 2002): 7-12
Early Modern Poetry
‘Elegy: Love and Death’, in The Oxford History of Poetry in English, vol. 4: Sixteenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney and Catherine Bates (Oxford University Press, 2022)
‘Funeral Elegy’, The Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Blackwell, 2018), 353-364
‘To Weep Irish: The Politics of Early Modern Keening’, Law and Mourning, ed. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), 59-93
‘From Grief to Leisure: Lycidas in the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Language Quarterly 77.1 (2016): 41-63
‘Hubbub and Satire’, Renaissance Studies 30.1 (2016): 120-136
‘The Physics of Melting in Early Modern Love Poetry’, Cerae 1 (October 2014): 22-52. Winner of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Western Australia Essay Prize.
‘The Platonic Poetry of Katherine Philips’, The Seventeenth Century 25.2 (January 2011): 300-322
“‘Without welt, gard, or embroidery”: A Funeral Elegy for Cicely Ridgeway, Countess of Londonderry (1628)’, Huntington Library Quarterly 72.3 (September 2009): 373-395
“Dying with Honour: Literary propaganda and the second English Civil War’, Journal of Military History 70.1 (Jan. 2006): 9-30. Winner of the Moncado Prize 2007
‘Elegy: Love and Death’, in The Oxford History of Poetry in English, vol. 4: Sixteenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney and Catherine Bates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)
‘Funeral Elegy’, The Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Blackwell, 2017)
‘To Weep Irish: The Politics of Early Modern Keening’, Law and Mourning, ed. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017)
‘Ghostly Authorities and the British Popular Press’, in Gothic Renaissance, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Beate Neumeier (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2014), 180-196
‘“These Dear Relicks”: Abiding Grief in Reformation England’ in The Reformation Unsettled: Pre-Reformation Religious Culture in Early Modern British Literature, 1560-1660, ed. J.-F. van Dijkhuizen (Leiden: Brepols, 2009), 183-203
‘The Gift of Mourning: Death in the Early Modern Household’ in Emotions in the Household, 1200-1900, ed. Susan Broomhall (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 185-202