Upping the Ante of the Real: Speculative Poetics of Leslie Scalapino

The author frames her reconstruction of the Bay Area poet, scholar, and experimental prose writer Leslie Scalapino’s transmedial poetics in the context of Scalapino’s published writings, available criticism of her works, as well as previously unpublished archival materials located among The Mandeville Special Collections and Archives at UC San Diego. Scalapino’s poetics are reconsidered here along the lines of new materialist modes of inquiry as well as contemporary new realist and speculative approaches that continue to grapple with the tension between thought and the social realm. «This is a pioneering attempt at grasping the ways in which Scalapino’s oeuvre radically transforms our apprehension of the notion of reality.» — Professor Zofia Kolbuszewska, University of Wroclaw