A new paradigm for queer theoryMichael Snediker offers a much-needed counterpoint to queer theoretical discourse, which has long privileged melancholy, self-shattering, incoherence, shame, and the death drive. Recovering the forms of positive affect that queer theory has jettisoned, Snediker insists that optimism must itself be taken beyond conventional tropes of hope and futurity and reimagined as necessary for critical engagement.Through fresh, perceptive, and sensitive readings of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Bishop, Snediker reveals that each of these poets demonstrated an interest in the durability of positive affects. Dickinson, Snediker argues, expresses joy and grace as much as pain and loss, and the myriad cryptic smiles in Hart Crane’s White Building contradict prevailing narratives of Crane’s apocryphal literary failures and eventual suicide.Snediker’s ambitious and sophisticated study, informed by thinkers such as Winnicott, Deleuze,