Nasser Hussain often attended to the relation between law and poetry and this article begins with a reading of his brief paper "Auden's Law like Love." In a famous essay, "Nomos and Narrative," Robert Cover linked the communication and the application of legal norms to narrative. This article presents an alternative, anti-normative, and anti-narrative, notion of the relation between poetry and justice that one might call "a-nomos and lyric." It argues that an alternative conception of "poetic justice" persists in the fundamental, paradoxical sociality of a poetic language that resists consumption and subsumption as it does coercion. In its very redundancy, in both the semantic and economic senses of the word, poetry renders to us an apprehension of what "justice" might be as opposed to law. Where law determines, decides, and pronounces sentence, justice opens the space of attentiveness that necessarily suspends the decision of the law. This idea of poetry unties the knotting of nomos to narrative as it stages the indeterminacy of the sentence and of the bounds of experience. Through its redundancy, condensation and proliferation of meaning through tropes, and its delay of the arrival of sense, poetry offers a different understanding of the relation of law and literature than arguments based on narrative can attain. It offers a model of justice beyond the law.
