This volume builds on recent scholarship on contemporary poetry in relation to medieval
literature focusing on postmodern poets who work with the medieval in a variety of ways. Such
recent projects invert or queer the usual transactional nature of engagements with older forms
of literature in which readers are asked to exchange some small measure of bewilderment at
archaic language or forms for a sense of having experienced a medieval text. The poets under
consideration in this volume demand that readers grapple with the ways in which we are still
medieval - in other words the ways in which the questions posed by their medieval source
material still reverberate and hold relevance for today's world. They do so by challenging the
primacy of present over past toppling the categories of old and new and suggesting new
interpretive frameworks for contemporary and medieval poetry alike.
