Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet is the first book of essays to consider the poetry of one of the twentieth- and early twenty-first-century’s most important literary, affect, and queer theorists. Acclaimed as one of the truly innovative poets of her generation by Maud Ellmann, Sedgwick’s work as a poet is, perhaps, less well known, but is no less compelling than her ground-breaking trilogy of queer theoretical texts: Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Epistemology of the Closet, and Tendencies.

The book includes seven specially commissioned essays considering Sedgwick’s published poetry and writing about poets, by Angus Brown, Meg Boulton, Mary Baine Campbell, Jason Edwards, Kathryn R. Kent, Monica Pearl, and Benjamin Westwood, that range across the complete range of Sedgwick’s work, from her earliest published lyrics through her first collection of poetry, Fat Art, Thin Art, to her part-haiku, part-prose autobiography, A Dialogue on Love, and beyond. In addition, the book contains over forty of Sedgwick’s previously uncollected poems, ranging from her earliest poem on T.E. Lawrence to her final poem ‘Death’, introduced and contextualized by Edwards.

TABLE OF CONTENTS //

Part I. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet

Jason Edwards - Introduction: Bathroom Songs? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet

Angus Connell Brown - Look with Your Hands

Ben Westwood - The Abject Animal Poetics of ‘The Warm Decembers’

Kathryn R. Kent - Eve’s Muse

Mary Baine Campbell - ‘Shyly / as a big sister I would yearn / to trace its avocations’, or, Who’s the Muse?

Monica Pearl - Queer Therapy: On the Couch with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Meg Boulton - Waiting in the Dark: Some Musings on Sedgwick’s Performative(s)

Part II. The Uncollected Poems

Jason Edwards - Introduction: Someday We’ll Look Back with Pleasure Even on is: Sedgwick’s Uncollected Poems

Poems