Dr Mae Losasso

About

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Until 2023, I was a Teaching Associate at Royal Holloway University of London and a Research Associate at the University of York. My first book, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), examines the relationship between poetics and architecture in the work of the first generation New York School poets, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler. Reappraising the much-debated New York School label, the book shows how these writers constructed poetic spaces, structures, surfaces, and apertures, and sought to figure themselves and their readers in relation to these architextual sites.

My current research project, entitled ‘Breathturn’, develops a novel theory of the lyric that reads breathlessness as the defining trope in late-modernist Anglophone poetics. My contention is that the proliferation of the long form in post-war poetics (1945 to the present) is tied to an overwhelming sense of exhaustion that is not only aesthetic (i.e. an exhausted late modernism) but social, political, corporeal, and ecological. Through both formal and thematic experiments with poetic breath(lessness), the late-modernist lyric is, I argue, both symptomatic of these broader contexts, and critical of them. By attending to the forms of exhaustion and breathlessness that have inflected the postwar period, this research seeks to address our increasingly breathless moment (Covid-19; Black Lives Matter; environmental; crisis; air pollution; rising cases of respiratory disease linked to resource extraction labour; the expanded use of biochemical warfare) through sustained engagements with poetic theory and praxis.

For this project, I examine the poetry of a number of post-45 American, Canadian, and British poets, including: Charles Olson, W. S. Graham, Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, M. NourbeSe Philip, Juliana Spahr, Denise Riley, Alice Notley, Lisa Robertson, Sean Bonney, and Keston Sutherland. In doing so, this project maps a preoccupation with the breath and breathlessness through close readings of a range of Anglophone poets across the period, positing that a turn towards the breath – or a breathturn, a neologism I borrow from Paul Celan – is part of a tectonic cultural, political and aesthetic shift that redefines poetic practice after 1945 – and continues to reverberate in the present.

Research interests

Poetry & poetics; theories of the lyric; cultural criticism; poetics and visual cultures; American literature; C20th and C21st literatures. I teach courses on poetics and literary theory and have supervised dissertations on Dylan Thomas, Romantic poetry and visual art, and suffocation in Victorian poetry.

I co-convene (with Stacey McDowell) the Poetry at WarwickLink opens in a new window research centre and organise Warwick's contemporary poetry series Lilac CubeLink opens in a new window, which hosts regular readings by both local and international poets. Readers at the series have included CAConrad, Holly Pester, Stephen Collis, and Robert Hampson.

 

Teaching and supervision

Undergraduate Modules

• EN2K1 and EN3K1 American Poetry
• EN2L4 Literature in TheoryLink opens in a new window

Selected publications

Monographs:

• Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School. London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

Edited special issues:

• Cities of Global ModernismLink opens in a new window. Special issue of Modernist Cultures (co-editor), Vol. 20 No. 1, 2025.

Articles & book chapters:

• Suddenly Weightless: On Alice Notley. n+1, 2025.
• Review of Holly Pester's The LodgersLink opens in a new window. Chicago Review, 68:01, 2025.
• Cities of Global Modernism: IntroductionLink opens in a new window (co-authored). Modernist Cultures, Vol. 20 No. 1, 2025.
• Review of The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems of Bunny LangLink opens in a new window. PN Review. Manchester: Carcanet, 2024.
• The Time is Now. The Architecture of Silence (ed. C. White). Rome: Contrasto, 2023.
• Conspiration: On Poetry and Breathing. The Contemporary Journal 4 (December 07, 2022).
• “Remember to slam the parentheses behind you”: structures of attention in the lyric poetry of James Schuyler. Textual Practice, 36:5, 2022, 732-750. DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1839958.
• Telltale misadventure: A review of Steven Seidenberg’s Anon. Jacket2, University of Pennsylvania. December 2022.

Forthcoming:

• Review of A Day Like Any Other. The Yale Review, 2025.
• ‘Frank O’Hara in New York’. Frank O’Hara in Context (ed. A. Epstein), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026.