American Experiment: A Poem Volume 42 - Paperback

by Aaron Baker (Author)

In American Experiment, Aaron Baker embarks on a harrowing odyssey through the depths of the American subconscious. Guided by the spirit of Walt Whitman (a character of somewhat suspect motives in this iteration), Baker's Dantean journey leads him through an ever more perilous underworld of American histories, myths, and mythmakers. Chronicling the pair's transcontinental passage from west to east (a kind of reverse Manifest Destiny), Baker offers a radical reimagining of Whitman's legacy, American poetry, and the role of the poet while inviting us to confront echoes of the nation's past and the enduring complexities of its present. With formal innovations that mirror the fluidity of Whitman's verse, Baker adds qualities of verbal subtlety and formal nimbleness perhaps more typical of Whitman's then mostly unknown contemporary, Emily Dickinson. American Experiment offers both narrative sweep and lyrical intensity, engaging deeply with literary history while relentlessly pushing the boundaries of poetic technique and form. This journey through hell is also a sustained meditation on the soul of America.

Author Biography

AARON BAKER is the author of two award-winning collections of poems: Mission Work (Houghton Mifflin), which won both the Katherine Bakeless Prize in Poetry and the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and Posthumous Noon (Gunpowder Press), winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. He teaches in the creative writing program at Loyola University Chicago.