08/17/2026
The Grolier Poetry Book Shop Lecture Series Talk 5 features Amy De'Ath delivering the lecture Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction on Wednesday, September 2, 2026 at 7 pm. Please join us in person or virtually. Please note in person is standing room only. Sign up via our website.
In this daring study, Amy De'Ath develops a new type of feminist literary criticism attuned to the way our lives are shaped by capital's impersonal compulsions – by what happens "behind our backs." Close reading works by Kay Gabriel, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil and others, Behind Our Backs explains how capital’s gendering inversions are felt and critiqued in the poetic experiments of trans, q***r, Indigenous, and diasporic writing.
Amy De’Ath is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University. Her essays on poetry, gender, and social reproduction are widely published, and she is also the author of several poetry collections, most recently Not A Force of Nature (Futurepoem, 2024). She lives in Boston, on the unceded territories of the Massachusetts and the Mashpee Wôpanâak First Peoples.
