Lyric Trade digs into how poems use lyric in relation to race, gender, nation, and empire. Engaging with poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, H.D., Lorine Niedecker, Alice Notley, and Myung Mi Kim, it argues that lyric in the postwar long poem not only registers the ideological contradictions of modernism's insistence on new forms, but that it also maps spaces for formal reimaginings of the subject.