“New Sincerity”, a renewed attention to sincerity, has been connected to
metamodernism, a periodizing term that marks a tension between irony
and sincerity and an extension of modernism and postmodernism. While
both New Sincerity and metamodernism have been discussed in relation to
fiction and the other arts, they have not been widely considered in
poetry. The article considers the associations of the term New Sincerity
in US poet Dorothea Lasky’s work, placing her work in the context of
metamodernism. With reference to metarepresentation, a cognitive science
term that refers to conceptualising what others think, I argue that in
Lasky’s poems, New Sincerity functions as a persuasive tonal orientation
that exhibits sincerity’s vexed position as both seemingly naïve and
necessary. Lasky’s poems make use of the human mind’s
metarepresentational capacity as they fluctuate between sincerity and
irony.