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A Poem Containing a History of Poetry
by Ryan Ruby
Literary critic Ryan Ruby uncovers the secret history of poetry in a mock-academic verse essay filled with wit and wisdom.
Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Epic in sweep, Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet—from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the American Midwest to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Cheekily introducing academic discourse, media studies, cybersemiotics, literary sociology, and heterodox economics into his blank verse study of poetry, Ruby traces the always delicate dance between poets, their publishers, and their audiences, and shows how, time and time again, the social, technological, and aesthetic experiments that appear in poetic language have prefigured radical changes to the ways of life of millions of people. It is precisely to poets to whom we ought to turn to catch a glimpse, as Shelley once put it, of the "gigantic shadows futurity casts on the present."
"[D]azzling and ambitious...Ruby's effortless synthesis of artistic, cultural, and technological developments makes him an excellent historical guide, and the verse essay format—consciously modeled on the argumentative poetry of Parmenides and Alexander Pope, among others—proves a novel reading experience. This literary history stands in a class all its own." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Ryan Ruby has written a daring kind of essay. The verse text and verse footnotes conflate and flail, destabilizing and stylizing one another like conjoined twins." —Don Mee Choi, author of DMZ Colony
"Context Collapse is an erudite and a perceptive essay in the form of a poem, which traces the history of poetry from ancient orality to the electronic age. Using both the line and the footnote in a self-referential and sophisticated performance, it argues that what poetry is depends on the economic, social and technological conditions of its production." —Eugene Ostashevsky, author of The Feeling Sonnets
"It seems impossible that Context Collapse is as wildly erudite and incredibly fun as it is. What a grand survey of poetry, in poetry! I'm envious of Ryan Ruby for succeeding so brilliantly with this bold and cheeky (and frankly insane) project." —Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
This information about Context Collapse was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ryan Ruby is a critic, novelist, and translator from French. He is the author of The Zero and the One: A Novel (Twelve Books, 2017) and his criticism has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, POETRY, The Believer, The Point, and the New Left Review. He is the recipient of the 2019 Albert Einstein Fellowship from the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, and the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism. He currently teaches creative writing at the Berlin Writers' Workshop.
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