Poetry and Emergent Worlds explores how some of the most innovative strategies, forms and themes in postwar American poetry are concerned with ideas of the child and with childishness. The book offers a survey of the relationship between poetry, childhood and sexuality in a range of 20th and 21st-century American poets. Drawing upon the latest perspectives from psychoanalytic and queer theories of the child, the book demonstrates the extent to which the child stands as a central figure in our thinking about American culture and to its poetic traditions in particular.

The book examines work by a range of postwar American poets, from Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Joe Brainard to Claudia Rankine, micha cárdenas and Andrea Brady.