ABSTRACT

The genre of elegy is intrinsically fraught with irresolvable contradictions such as between the desire for consolation, and the need to deny that any compensation for the one lost is possible. This chapter argues that elegiac poems in Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art, Aja Monet’s My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, and Shane McCrae’s In the Language of My Captor respond to such contradictions by expanding the genre across the boundaries often constructed in American elegy between nations and temporal periods. Their poems reveal that these national and temporal boundaries tend to silence institutional critique, serving to buttress claims that it is always “too soon” to shift attention from individual deaths toward reform. To render porous through elegiac innovation the boundaries of temporality and nation by which responses to black deaths are normativized is to disrupt the power of the white-supremacist state, hopefully contributing to a future in which these elegiac interventions prove less necessary.