Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization shows how the forms of contemporary poetry are forged through the transformations of globalization from 1970 to the present. The book's inquiry springs from two related questions: what happens when we think of poetry as a global literary form, and when we think of the global in poetic terms? I argue that analyses of globalization are incomplete without poetry, and that contemporary poetry cannot be understood fully without acknowledging the global forces from which it arises. Forms of a World contends that poetry's role is not only to make visible thematically the violence of global dispossessions, but to renew performatively the missing conditions for intervening within these processes. Poetic acts--in this book, the rhetoric of possessing, belonging, exhorting, and prospecting--address contemporary conditions that render social life ever more precarious. I turn to an eclectic group of Anglophone poets, from Seamus Heaney and Claudia Rankine to Natasha Trethewey and Kofi Awoonor, whose poetry and whose lives are, in different but related ways, inseparable from the contemporary global situation. These poets creatively intervene in global processes by remaking their poetry's repertoire of forms, from experiments in the sonnet to contemporary inventions of the ode.