Irreverent and provoking, the figure of the 'queer troublemaker' is a disruptive force both poetically and politically. Tracing the genealogy of this figure in modern avant-garde American poetry, Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain develops innovative close readings of the works of Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson. Exploring how these writers play with identity, gender, sexuality and genre, Bussey-Chamberlain constructs a queer poetics of flippancy that can subvert ideas of success and failure, affect and affectation, performance and performativity, poetry and being.

Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. She is the author of The Feminist Fourth Wave: Affective Temporalities (2017) and three books of poetry: House of Mouse (with S. J. Folwer, 2016), Coteries (2018) and *Retroviral (2018).