COLT Associate Professor Leah Middlebrook’s new book, Amphion: Lyre, Poiesis, and Politics in Modernity, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.  Anchored in Renaissance Humanist interpretations of the myth of Amphion, King of Thebes, this book recovers an overlooked poetic tradition. In Amphionic poetry, the lyre figures the human power to stir action, creation, and destruction by means of language. Amphion raises states and razes civilizations, and he builds new cities from the rubble of communities and polities his lyre lays to waste. Through readings of poetry and theory from the Anglophone, French, Italian, and Hispanic worlds, Amphion: Lyre, Poiesis, and Politics in Modernity sets a new through-line for lyric poetry, one that extends from the age of Hapsburg imperial expansion to postmodern poetries by writers including Trevor Joyce, Raúl Zurita, and the Language poets. In so doing, the book presents an account of lyric well-suited to our times.