In this essay I argue that increasing blurring of boundaries between representational and the real has been characcteristic of the War on terror. I then argue that has produced a response in contemporary American poetry which attempts to produce a critique by collapsing or undermining these distinctions fictionally in order to draw attention to their collapse in political and military discourse. Looking at several poems which take photography as a theme, I aim to show how a specific genre of photo-ekphrastic poetry has proved partiularly germane to this effort.
12.1 Home - For our next issue, Excursions invites researchers from all disciplines to 'home in' on one or several aspects of home, a complex signifier imbued with contradiction, and deserving of academic attention.
