"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 "Reader! In this book, you are sitting for a family portrait. Ryan Ruby has written a poem of poetry's audience, from first song by firelight to the cool blue of the computer screen. The story he tells is learned, witty, bright with shards of lyric; a surreptitious media theory by turns elegiac and inspiring. You will see your self here, and we can see each other, and all of us can remember how good it gets when humans pay attention to what humans make." --Jeff Dolven, author of
Senses of Style and
*A New English Grammar "With perverse, provocative persistence, Ryan Ruby shores a fragmentary history of the ancient technology of poetry against its modern ruins. Poetry's audience, he argues, is hastily going the way of all flesh--a context that renders his Herculean labor futile. How, then, does Ruby manage to make his verse essay so very compelling? What does its propulsive power and persuasiveness tell us not only about what poetry can do, but also about ourselves? These are the stimulating and, indeed, pressing questions posed by
Context Collapse, an ars poetica like no other." --Boris Dralyuk, author of
My Hollywood "What a joy it is to think alongside Ryan Ruby. In
Context Collapse, critical argument and literary history become sensuous and playful, provocative in the best sense and, by the end, deeply moving." --Phil Klay, author of
Redeployment
"An epic on the history of poetry may seem an unlikely project, but this delightfully witty (and erudite) romp through poetry and its technologies works up to a sobering, urgent, apocalyptic conclusion."--Rosmarie Waldrop,
The Nick of Time
