Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis

“Anna Veprinska’s Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis adds a brilliant and wonderfully clear-eyed new conceptual lens to understanding not just ‘poetry after crisis,’ but really all representations of violence and suffering—in literature, art, and survivor testimony. In her deep excursus on ‘empathy’ and ‘empathetic dissonance’ as conceptual frames for understanding such art, Veprinska brings a poet’s eye and crystal clear prose to bear on a wide range of aesthetic responses to catastrophe.”



—James E. Young, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English and Judaic & Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

This book examines the representation of empathy in contemporary poetry after crisis, specifically poetry after the Holocaust, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. The text argues that, recognizing both the possibilities and dangers of empathy, the poems under consideration variously invite and refuse empathy, thus displaying what Anna Veprinska terms empathetic dissonance. Veprinska proposes that empathetic dissonance reflects the texts’ struggle with the question of the value and possibility of empathy in the face of the crises to which these texts respond. Examining poems from Charlotte Delbo, Dionne Brand, Niyi Osundare, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Fitterman, Wisława Szymborska, Cynthia Hogue, Claudia Rankine, Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Lucille Clifton, and Katie Ford, among others, Veprinska considers empathetic dissonance through language, witnessing, and theology. Merging comparative close readings with interdisciplinary theory from philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, history and literary theory, and trauma studies, this book juxtaposes a genocide, a terrorist act, and a natural disaster amplified by racial politics and human disregard in order to consider what happens to empathy in poetry after events at the limitsof empathy. 

Anna Veprinska teaches at York University and Seneca College, CA, and has published a book of poems as well as articles in Contemporary Literature and The Bristol Journal of English Studies.