Hambone's call: Nathaniel Mackey and editorial poetics

This essay examines Nathaniel Mackey's editorship of the literary journalHambone. Placing Mackey's editorship in conversation with his theory of 'discrepant engagement', which he describes as a stylised practice that seeks to open 'presumably closed orders of identity and signification', I argue that Mackey develops an editorial poetics that opens American literary culture to a deep history of African American and cross-cultural creative expression and improvisation. The history of such improvisation - often taken up in the face dispossession - transforms Mackey's editorial poetics into a sustained reflection on concepts of labour and hospitality at work in everyday creative practices.