I sometimes like the poems of Sharif, Chen Chen, and Danez Smith, though I find the latter two often anti-intellectual, narrow-minded, and Americentric. The less said about Sharif's propagandist "Persian Letters" poem the better. Recently a friend, who lives in Abu Dhabi and travels widely, was speaking to me about how American writers take identity politics as a universally acknowledged fact, when really it is accepted by a small percentage of people and only within the Anglosphere.
Identity politics can be dismissed on Marxist grounds (Asad Haider explains it well
here, though he is definitely not the first to do so). In literature, one reason I dislike the poetry of identity is because identity deals in the general—being gay or brownish—and not in the specificities of the individual, which cannot be reduced to identity. Identity is what you call yourself because of other people and society; the opposite would be what the cat at the end of T. S. Eliot’s The Naming of Cats is doing: “When you notice a cat in profound meditation / The reason, I tell you, is always the same: / His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation / Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: / His ineffable effable / Effanineffable / Deep and inscrutable singular Name.”
The current movement will pass. I am not surprised that poetry is more popular than in times past, but then again, more people are in writing programs now than ever before. Most of the poets mentioned I find unimaginative; and I already know what it's like to be gay and brownish, so I am not sure what their poetry offers me.