Assembling absences: Anna Mendelssohn, Jennifer Moxley, and the transnational carceral poetics of the 1990s

A network of carceral poetics in the nineties is traceable in the work of women poets such as Anna Mendelssohn, Wendy Mulford, Fanny Howe, and Jennifer Moxley, but that network should not be read as a coterie or a defined "school" of poetics. Instead, it is a network of a shared poetic commitments to a feminist experimentalism and to a transnational cultural exchange. Moreover, it is a network that is structured by absence. In order to trace and reassemble some of these absences, this essay brings Mendelssohn's carceral poetry belatedly into contact with a transnational network of feminist poetics. I focus my argument around two pamphlets published in 1996: Mendelssohn's pamphlet Parasol One. Parasol Two. Parasol Avenue. and Moxley's Enlightenment Evidence, both of which give voice to historic and ongoing instances of incarceration. In my argument, Mendelssohn's and Moxley's carceral poetics realize a reflexive engagement with the past and, through modernist techniques and feminist strategies, articulate an intersubjective, carceral aesthetic that looks backwards in order to overcome the individualistic feminist turn of the nineties.