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This article considers processes of environmental racialisation in the postgenomic era through their politics of difference and poetics of influence. Subfields like epigenetics promise to account for a plurality of possible influences on health outcomes. While this appears to present possibilities for historical reparation to communities whose epigenomes may have been chronically altered by histories of violence and trauma, the prevailing trend has been to compound processes of racialisation in the reproduction of good/bad environments. The postgenomic era has promised an epistemological transformation of ideas and values of human life, but its practices, technologies and ideology have so far prevented this. Epigenetics, rather, reproduces biomedical exclusions through imaginaries of embodied contexts, methods of occlusion and hypervisibility, and assignations of delay and deviance. This is more complex than both genetic reductionism and environmental racism: studies on epigenetics reveal a poetics of influence at work under liberal humanism complicit in the creation of death-worlds for racialised populations. Other experiments with life are possible and unfolding: Jay Bernard’s poem ‘Chemical’, set in the aftermath of London’s Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, unmoors its bodies from material environment, offering a spectral configuration of collective life. This configuration involves negotiating with the fixing of time and space on which genomic imaginaries depend.

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This essay reads Max Ritvo’s poetry through a chronology of precision biomedicine: imaging, diagnosis, and treatment. Ritvo’s construction of a patient-consumer avatar in his poetry reflects his position at a biomedical frontier, while poetic form becomes a way of retrieving bodies from a logic of substitution and surrogacy. A body lying under the weight of relentless, and relentlessly variable, imaging is catapulted through memory to a place by the sea in “The Curve.” In “Poem to My Litter,” the speaker addresses the laboratory mice injected with his tumors, drawing himself closer to them through their shared imprisonment in bodies on their way out of life, and suspending a bioeconomy embedded in a moral economy of sacrifice and faith. If precision medicine depends on making the analogical and metaphorical into common consensus—images that stand in for bodies, codes that stand in for disease—then Ritvo upends its neat architecture. He sticks instead with the messiness of bodies failing to meet an elusive salvation.