The September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, carried out by al-Qaeda, led to the rapid passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in October 2001, which dramatically expanded federal law enforcement powers to gather electronic evidence, conduct surveillance, and share intelligence between agencies. The attacks also created the largest forensic evidence-gathering operation in American history at Ground Zero in New York, identifying victims through DNA, dental records, and fingerprints in complex and sometimes heartbreaking circumstances.

The events of 9/11 and the surveillance legislation that followed generated one of the largest bodies of immediate literary response in American history — poems, elegies, documentary writings, and political essays that engaged with evidence, testimony, and the use of catastrophe to justify surveillance. Poets including Frank Bidart, Sharon Olds, and Galway Kinnell wrote about September 11, while the post-9/11 surveillance state became a defining context for American poetry about privacy, freedom, and the evidentiary relation between citizen and state.