In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and the failure of levees flooded much of New Orleans. The disaster exposed unequal vulnerability shaped by race, poverty, wetland loss, and urban planning. It became a defining American example of natural hazard intensified by human systems.

Katrina generated a major body of poetry, including Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler and work by Brenda Marie Osbey and Natasha Trethewey. Poets turned water, rooflines, mould, names, and bureaucratic neglect into forms of witness for a drowned city.