1. 'Black! Back! Back! Central Mind Machine Pentagon...': Allen Ginsberg and the Vietnam War
The possibility of the 1960s
The war's start and a change of heart
'Miserable picnic, Police State or Garden of Eden?'
'Bodies alert' and the war's end
2. 'This Black World of Purest Possibility': LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
Black Power and black possibility
'My poetry is whatever I think I am': from Beats to Black Arts
From Pan-Africanism to Third-World Socialism
3. Writing Outer Space for 'Potential America': William S. Burroughs
Cut-ups, fold-ins, and the Nova trilogy
From watershed to Watergate
Space exploration in the 1970s
The Cities of the Red Night trilogy
From 'Star Wars' to 'Critical Space'
4. Novel Biopolitics: Kathy Acker and Michel Foucault
Self-writing, dreams, and allobiography
Blood and Guts in High School: from sympathy to 'order words'
Homo œconomicus and Corporeality Inc.
'This's no world for idealism': AIDS, abortion, and Reagan's body
Empire of the Senseless: cyberdrag and 'languages of the body'
Pussy, King of the Pirates: filthy myth and the 'language of abjection'
5. Making a Person Possible: Lyn Hejinian and Language Poetry
Language Group beginnings: 'the 1960s by other means'?
'Oneself is possible': My Life
The Conspiracy of 'US': 1980s language politics
Russia, estrangement, and the 'cold of poetry'
Happily: from amor fati to amor possibilis
A Border Comedy and The Fatalist: a critique of fatal judgement
Conclusion: Potentialism and Practical Imagination
