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In this essay I use Sean Bonney’s work from 2010 to 2019 to reflect on some of the ways that contemporary UK poets have figured political defeat in an era of right-wing government both domestically and worldwide. Bonney was a key figure for a small but thriving scene of contemporary UK-based experimental poets whose work has frequently been concerned with this political environment. Bonney’s work as both poet and scholar created a kind of assemblage, loosely organized under the term “militant poetics,” encompassing the US Black radical tradition, the Frankfurt school, European surrealism, and British anarchism and radicalism from Abiezer Coppe to Blake. This is at once a chosen genealogy of past exemplars for Bonney’s own work—a kind of chosen poetic family—and a series of tools for thinking about the contemporary moment. Likewise, I will argue in this essay that his own work serves as a similar toolkit for thinking about the present conjuncture, and, in particular, the problem of political defeat.