Jennifer Soong

My most recent books of poetry include My Earliest Person (The Last Books), Comeback Death (Krupskaya), and a forthcoming book-length poem called Requiem. The best way to read my poetry is to access a physical copy.

In 2025 the University of Chicago Press published my critical book Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting, which explores the relationship between poetic composition and the absence or failure of memory. I have also written about a wide range of topics, including the pronoun "it" in lyric poetry, the figure of the minor poet, Tan Lin, the New York School, John Wieners, and J.H. Prynne. These essays can be found at Critical Inquiry, Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, Post45, and the Journal of Modern Literature.

I teach and advise students in the following areas: poetry and poetics, aesthetics, small press publishing, critical theory, the historical avant-garde, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and linguistics. I am also interested in modern and contemporary transatlantic literature, with an emphasis on poetry in the UK.

I joined the Department of English and Literary Arts at DU in 2023. Prior to that I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford. I received my PhD from Princeton and my BA from Harvard.