FROM THE PUBLISHER

A new collection of essays from a distinguished critic of contemporary poetry.

Marjorie Perloff is one of the foremost critics of contemporary American poetry writing today. Her works are credited by many with creating and sustaining new critical interest not only in the work of major modernist poets such as Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Williams but also in the postwar tradition of American poetic innovation that ranges from the Black Mountain poets, through the New York School and concrete poetry, to the Language Poets of the 1980s and '90s.

In Differentials, Perloff explores and defends her belief in the power of close reading, a strategy often maligned as reactionary in today's critical climate but which, when construed differentially, is vital, she believes, to any true understanding of a literary or poetic work, irrespective of how traditional or experimental it is. Perloff also examines key issues in modernism, from Eliot's conservative poetics and Pound's nominalism to translation theory (Wittgenstein, Eugene Jolas, Haroldo de Campos), and the contemporary avant garde, as represented by writers like Susan Howe, Tom Raworth, Rae Armantrout, Ron Silliman, Ronald Johnson, Caroline Bergvall, and Kenneth Goldsmith.

Ultimately, Perloff's most important offerings in Differentials are her remarkably original reflections on the aesthetic process: on how poetry works, and what it means, in and for our time.

"Marjorie Perloff shows once again why she is the most readable—and read—critic of modern and contemporary poetry. In these 'confessions of a close reader,' Perloff delights, cajoles, and informs, with astute essays on both the state of the art and the state of the humanities. From new scholarship on the modernists to vibrant encounters with the newest writing, Perloff's Differentials is an indispensable guide." —Charles Bernstein, coeditor, Modern and Contemporary Poetics series

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