A Poetics of Apology theorizes apology as a capacious genre by reading precisely those apologies which are often dismissed as such—defense speeches, off-the-cuff quotidian apologetics, and infelicitous and ironic apologies—in order to examine the ways that this genre is used to a variety of effects in politics, literature, and daily life, apart from the generic expectation of producing forgiveness or closure. I identify three characteristic aspects: a narration of a past event, the establishing of a relationship across a binarized apologizer and recipient, and a transformative operation that rewrites the harm through a desire to undo or alter it. I uncover a history of apologies as fraught performatives which are transformative in their expected capacity to repair relationships in the aftermath of harm, but which are also creatively and efficaciously employed across power dynamics (as when a wage laborer apologizes to a customer or when a woman apologizes to safely escape unwanted attention or to navigate a situation of racialized tension and violence.) In chapters on queer performance art by Vaginal Davis, José Munoz, Adrian Piper, AA Bronson, and Adrian Stimson, public conversations between James Baldwin and Margaret Meade, novels by James Agee and Walker Evans, and poetry by Layli Long Solider and Claudia Rankine, I examine how the narrative, relational, and transformative facets of apology are deployed in the context of race relations, class and conversation, and scaled modes of address between indigenous artists and colonial nation-states.