Toshiaki Komura is associate professor of English at Kobe College.

In this remarkable book, Toshiaki Komura has discovered a poetic genre hiding, like Poe’s purloined letter, in plain sight. “Lost loss” is a perfect way of naming that elusive sense of loss at the equivocal core of some of the most compelling American poems, from Wallace Stevens to the poetic “first responders” of 9/11. We may have thought we knew what poetic elegies were all about. Komura makes us think again.

• Introduction Chapter 1: Wallace Stevens’s Elegiac Mode: Creating Fictions of LossChapter 2: Sylvia Plath’s Poems of 1963: Dysthymia and Subterranean LossChapter 3: Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III: Unlosing Lost LossChapter 4: Sharon Olds’s The Dead and the Living: Distant Loss and Ethical EmpathyChapter 5: Post 9-11 Elegiac Poetry: the UnsaidConclusion & Afterword: Lost Loss beyond American Elegiac PoetryAcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorIndex

Toshiaki Komura is associate professor of English at Kobe College.

In this remarkable book, Toshiaki Komura has discovered a poetic genre hiding, like Poe’s purloined letter, in plain sight. “Lost loss” is a perfect way of naming that elusive sense of loss at the equivocal core of some of the most compelling American poems, from Wallace Stevens to the poetic “first responders” of 9/11. We may have thought we knew what poetic elegies were all about. Komura makes us think again.

• Introduction Chapter 1: Wallace Stevens’s Elegiac Mode: Creating Fictions of LossChapter 2: Sylvia Plath’s Poems of 1963: Dysthymia and Subterranean LossChapter 3: Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III: Unlosing Lost LossChapter 4: Sharon Olds’s The Dead and the Living: Distant Loss and Ethical EmpathyChapter 5: Post 9-11 Elegiac Poetry: the UnsaidConclusion & Afterword: Lost Loss beyond American Elegiac PoetryAcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorIndex

Toshiaki Komura is associate professor of English at Kobe College.

In this remarkable book, Toshiaki Komura has discovered a poetic genre hiding, like Poe’s purloined letter, in plain sight. “Lost loss” is a perfect way of naming that elusive sense of loss at the equivocal core of some of the most compelling American poems, from Wallace Stevens to the poetic “first responders” of 9/11. We may have thought we knew what poetic elegies were all about. Komura makes us think again.

• Introduction Chapter 1: Wallace Stevens’s Elegiac Mode: Creating Fictions of LossChapter 2: Sylvia Plath’s Poems of 1963: Dysthymia and Subterranean LossChapter 3: Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III: Unlosing Lost LossChapter 4: Sharon Olds’s The Dead and the Living: Distant Loss and Ethical EmpathyChapter 5: Post 9-11 Elegiac Poetry: the UnsaidConclusion & Afterword: Lost Loss beyond American Elegiac PoetryAcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorIndex