Assembling Alternatives brings together five English-speaking communities -- the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland and Australia -- to discuss how national differences have inflected poetic experimentation. The 24 essays provide historic overviews, close readings, personal views and polemics on poetics as they have developed in situ. These "oppositional poetries" and poetics are highly diverse and can only be unified -- as they are here -- as an imagined collective alternative to a mainstream and institutionalized practice of poetry. By tracing the varied histories and trajectories of innovative poetry in these countries, and by engaging in readings of specific texts from within these traditions, Assembling Alternatives suggests subtle but provocative differences in strategies of resistance, constructions of self, use of voice and use of technology.