This chapter explores developments in hemispheric and transamerican studies by grounding discussions of colonialism and incommensurability in narrations of place-names. It moves from the Pacific to the Midwest, using Commodore David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean, from the War of 1812, as a case study. Porter is of note not only because he was an important source for Herman Melville’s Pacific writings but also because his military travel writings sought to make the Marquesas part of the US political and popular imaginary. In renaming-to-claim the islands, Porter worked to undermine Indigenous epistemologies and histories. The chapter then turns to the Midwest, examining the Latin American place-names across the region – names that offer a nineteenth-century prehistory to accounts of widespread Midwestern Latinx presence. Surprisingly, stories of Porter’s battle off the coast of Chile in Journal of a Cruise have fed an imperialist “Latin American mapping” of Indiana through the naming of the city of Valparaiso, in Porter County. Using stories of place naming from the Indigenous Pacific and Latinx Midwest, the chapter highlights the vital necessity of hemispheric and transamerican literary studies for the nineteenth century.

This chapter explores transformations in the creation, transmission, and reception of Latin American poetries after 1980. One of these is ecopoetics, stimulated by shifting perspectives of both readers and writers living in a world in which we are increasingly aware of environmental change. Authors include Mexican Homero Arjidjis, Brazilian Astrid Cabral, Nicaraguan Esthela Calderón-Chevez, and Mapuche Elicure Chihauilaf. Other changes have to do with varying means of circulating poetry: through performance or electronic or multimedia presentations that expand what can be included in a poem, how it is constructed, and how it is received. We see this in Chilean Luis Díaz-Correa’s clickable poems, Argentine Belén Gache’s digital poems, and Uruguayans Juan Angel Italiano and Luis Bravo’s performative poetry. There are also contemporary approaches to reading Latin American poetries. Opening to transcontinental perspectives creates dialogues between North and South in Harris Feinsod’s and Charles Perrone’s approaches. Interdisciplinarity is a key feature of poetry considered in terms of health/illness, and looking at the work of Mexican Claudia Hernández del Valle Arizpe, Chilean Enrique Lihn, and Peruvian Victoria Guerrero Peirano demonstrates how lyric poetry is particularly suited to convey the body–mind collaboration or rebellion of serious illness.