A wonderful book! Daniela Kukrechtová finds a much-appreciated line of flight in the poetry of Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Frank O'Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks that elegantly straddles the dystopian/utopian divide of much of modern(ist) 'city talk.' Kukrechtová's book is a love letter to urbanism.

Bernd Herzogenrath, Professor of American Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany

This book brings poetry fully into the scholarly conversation about the place of the city in modernism. Unplanned Cities in Modern American Poetry anchors itself in skillfully detailed close readings of works by an important group of modernist and mid-century poets, all framed with relevant historical discourses about urbanism and careful attention to the place of segregation in these narratives.

Sarah Dowling, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Canada

Unplanned Cities in Modern American Poetry offers invigorating readings of five 20th-century American poets writing about the cities they knew intimately as urban residents. In clearly showing how writers used 'contra-symbolic' strategies to challenge the totalizing visions of city planners and to reveal the diversity of lived urban experience, Kukrechtová reminds us of literature's vital role in shaping understandings of spaces and places.

James Peacock, Reader in English and American Literatures, Keele University, UK