Mae Losasso is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her first book, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), examines the relationship between poetics and architecture in the work of New York School poets, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler. Her essays on poetics have appeared in: Textual Practice, Modernist Cultures, n+1, Chicago Review, PN Review, and Jacket2.
At the RAI, Mae will be working on a new research project titled ‘Breathturn’, which contributes to contemporary lyric theory discourse by reading breathlessness as a defining trope in late-modernist lyric poetry. The project contends that the proliferation of the long form lyric after 1950 gives voice to the various social, political, ecological, and aesthetic exhaustions that characterise the period. Attending to these modes of cultural fatigue, this research addresses our increasingly breathless contemporary moment through engagements with poetic theory and praxis.
Â
