BOOKS
ANIMALS I NEVER SAW
Winner of the Flume Press Chapbook Prize
Animals I Never Saw is an experimental collection of poetry in which lost histories are re-recorded, ornamental birds are de-taxidermied, and the echoes of extinction reach the ears of the future. Through a blend of prose, poetry, and structurally innovative forms, Andrews breathes life back into the Kaua’i ‘akialoa, an extinct species of bird, a used-to-be native species of the Hawai’ian islands, and asks us to reexamine what it means to be a neighbor of the living and the dead.
From the judge’s citation, by Rae Gouirand: “‘Insofar as it is extricable from desire, we might be the only species capable of feeling hope,’ notes Kimberly Quiogue Andrews in the opening lines of this stunning prayer of a chapbook, crashing the spontaneous kinesis of the poetic line straight into the unforgiving territory of confirmable fact. Andrews returns the sky to the foreground of our attention, and opens a place inside where grief songs can not only take root, but begin to lead us back towards something more closely resembling life.”
The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the american University
2024 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize Shortlist
“A fine-grained, critical interrogation of the overlaps and relays between spheres of university-affiliated literary critics and poets themselves. Amid careful, attentive engagement with the poets it studies, this book shows that if the humanities are in crisis it is precisely because of the pressure they put on other developments within society to which they might stand as a check.”
— Anthony Reed, Vanderbilt University, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production
A BRIEF HISTORY OF FRUIT
Winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry
Colonization, class dynamics, an abiding loneliness, and a place’s titular fruit—tiny Filipino limes, the frozen berries of rural America—all serve as focal markers in a book that insists that we hold life’s whole fragrant pollination in our hands and look directly at it, bruises and all.
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BETWEEN
“The ancient obsessions that bind these poems—language, relation, gender, embodiment—are reconstituted under Andrews’ pen. BETWEEN holds me in the space of that ever-crucial question: How else might we be?”
–Claire Schwartz, author of Civil Service and Bound
Poems/Essays/&C
Below, you can find further information about my research and writing interests, as well as a selection of my recent work available online. For a full list of publications, or if you do not have access to the databases on which some of my scholarship is held, please contact me.
Creative work
I have recently finished a book of poems and essayistic fragments, currently entitled The Lake, that focuses on the history and tropology of melancholy. While a melancholic disposition has often been associated with artists and thinkers, I have found few works of creative writing that have explicitly interrogated the overdetermined nature of this link—what, in other words, it is about thinking that is either caused by or causes sadness so persistent that it can be classified as disordered. A formally innovative work, The Lake weaves together prose segments grounded in historical research with fragmented lyric meditations on the state of affect in the present, arguing in the end that we do not yet know how to read narratives of illness that do not posit an eventual recovery. I am now in the early phase of research for a new creative book project that will take as its subject the religious, industrial, and cultural history of Bethlehem, PA.
The selection of poems below encompasses work from The Lake as well as poems from A Brief History of Fruit.
Some poems online:
“The Humors” in Four Way Review
”Essay on Tilt” in Guernica
“The server at my local tell me all viruses arrive on this planet via comet”and “The Donkey” in Sixth Finch
”Vita Speculativa” in Passages North
2 poems in The Florida Review
“Postantiquity” in Redivider
2 poems in Anomaly
“Burial at Sea” in The Journal
“The Result of an Overabundance of Scenery” in Tinderbox Poetry Journal
2 poems in Underblong
2 poems in Grist
“How to Get Into a Poem” in Poetry Northwest
criticism
As a scholar, I work primarily on poetry and poetics, with a special emphasis on American poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries. I am interested in particular in the relationship between poetic style and institutional contexts. My first book, The Academic Avant-Garde (2023, Johns Hopkins University Press), is a study of the effects that developments in the history of literary criticism and academic work more broadly have had on the aesthetics and methodologies of experimental American poetry. Its primary argument is that the labor and discursive stylings of textual and historical analysis, often seen as incompatible with the creation of literary writing, are in fact fundamental to the work of a range of highly influential and innovative poets. The book traces the parallel histories of reflexive discourses in both literary criticism and creative writing in the age of their professionalization, while intervening into debates about the value of the humanities writ large. Chapters organized by categories of labor (such as teaching) and methodological work (such as theorizing) provide a holistic picture of the humanities’ current professional remit, while also being attentive to that picture’s history. Each category is anchored by a poetic case study, or series thereof, that gives the category a stylistic or formal shape. Throughout, The Academic Avant-Garde demonstrates that the very qualities often taken as a mark of poetry's vanguardism—deep logical complexity, abstract cogitation, a commitment to process analysis—are now often inextricable from the academic contexts of their creation and reception.
I also have interests in translation theory and intellectual history, with an emphasis on the phenomenology of disciplines and disciplinarity. I have a trilogy of articles in the works on that emphasis: one on temporality forthcoming in Cultural Critique, another on close reading as worldbuilding under review at MLQ, and a third on literary(-critical) style under review at Textual Practice.
Some links to my critical work can be found below. If you do not have institutional access and would like a PDF, please contact me.
“Furious Flowering: Black Poetry and Institutional Durability” in The Cambridge History of African American Poetry, ed. Keith D. Leonard
“Theory on Theory” (long review-essay) in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
“Poetry in the Program Era” in The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Poetry, ed. Timothy Yu
“Resisting the Intelligence Almost Successfully: Wallace Stevens’s ‘Academic’ Style” in Modernist Cultures
“Trade Secrets: Poetry in the Teaching Machine” in New Literary History
“Learning to Read (with) John Ashbery” in the Los Angeles Review of Books
“Because I Have Nothing To Say: Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto and the Choral Voice” in ASAP/J
“What does translation know?” in Textual Practice