Beginning in the mid-2000s and accelerating through the 2010s, bedbug (Cimex lectularius) infestations in major Western cities including New York, London, and Paris reached epidemic proportions, fuelled by increased international travel, resistance to insecticides, and the banning of DDT. New York City experienced a particularly severe outbreak, with infestations reported in hotels, apartments, and even fashionable department stores. The resurgence of the bedbug — a parasite absent from much of the developed world for fifty years — attracted intense media and cultural attention.

The bedbug resurgence of the 2010s generated a small but vivid tradition of contemporary verse addressing this most intimate of domestic parasites. Poets from August Kleinzahler to various slam and spoken-word performers addressed the bedbug invasion as a commentary on globalisation, the limits of pesticide-driven control over nature, and the democratic levelling force of a parasite that attacked the wealthy and poor alike. The bedbug became a twenty-first century avatar of the Burnsian louse — a reminder that human pretension to parasite-free comfort was always provisional.