I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at Austin Peay State University, where I teach and write about twentieth-century poetry. I also serve as Secretary of the Wallace Stevens Society.
My first book, Echo & Critique: Poetry and Political Clichés after World War II (Louisiana State University Press, 2023), analyzes how postwar poets responded to the political doublespeak of their era by taking specific phrases (like “transfer of population,” “service the target” or “revenue enhancement”) and then putting pressure on them, drawing out their implications, and complicating them within a poem. At the same time, Echo & Critique argues that poets used this technique to weigh their own susceptibility to the clichés of public discourse. I have begun work on a second project that studies the central but little-discussed role of allusion in the development of queer poetry from the Oscar Wilde trial to the Stonewall riots.
My articles have appeared in such venues as MLQ, Essays in Criticism, Genre, Philological Quarterly, JML: Journal of Modern Literature,Twentieth Century Literature, Modernism/modernity, Arizona Quarterly, The Yale Review, and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. I have also reviewed contemporary poetry for Colorado Review Online, Chicago Review, PN Review, Harvard Review Online, and Rain Taxi.
If you'd like to contact me, I can be reached via email at gargaillof@apsu.edu.