In 1934, the Marxist and Modernist poet Louis Zukofsky was labelled a 'detached recorder of isolated events' by his communist contemporaries, a writer who 'identifies life with capitalism, and so assumes that the world is merely a wasteland'. Crisis and the US Avant-Garde charts the trajectory of this tension between avant-garde poetics and vanguard politics since the twin legacies of Modernism and the Great Depression. The book's radical reappraisal of twentieth-century experimental poetry in the US reads major figures including Charles Olson, Denise Levertov and Amiri Baraka within a new approach to traditional notions of historical context, exploring the ways in which poetry can properly be said to respond to political crises.