Literary Nonfiction. James Pate examines Gothic poetry and poetics by bringing the dream world, the material world, history, and critical theory into a vibrant discussion. Pate resists the traps of discourse that the Gothic aesthetic have fallen into by arguing for a new development in contemporary verse, one that runs counter to many 20th century trends in US poetry. These works are haunted by a Gothic ethos, being anti-foundationalist, anti-human-centric, and not afraid of facing nihility head-on. Drawing from contemporary works by Sade Murphy, Feng Sun Chen, and others, these meditations on the Gothic infect and distort the reader's canonical understanding of what this concept actually is, and how it operates within the flux of today's poetry.