American Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poetics - a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies - have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets - Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen and Claudia Rankine - use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt mainstream American language, literary genres and visual culture and expose the ways in which mass culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had a powerfully standardising impact on the collective American imagination. By forcing encounters between incompatible traditions - consumer culture with the avant-garde, low culture forms with experimental poetics, prose poetry with linguistic subversiveness - these poets bring together radically competing ideologies and highlight their implications for lived experience. Robbins argues that it is precisely because these poets have mixed forms that their work has gone largely unnoticed by leading members and critics in experimental poetry circles.

Robbins shows that while these poets employ widely varying linguistic strategies and topical range, they share a common and deeply critical vision of American popular culture as it promulgates bourgeois capitalist and imperialist values and forecloses possibilities for independent thought and creative resistance. They also share the view that contemporary history can be reimagined in intellectually liberating ways through hybrid poetics.