This pioneering collection of new essays challenges established modes of reading American lyric poetry, by orientating interpretation so that it incorporates an awareness of the book context in which individual poems are embedded. These essays critically explore individual books by Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian and Jorie Graham, and consider the book as a restrictive, “binding” concept for Emily Dickinson and some contemporary American poets. Rebound both provides innovative readings of supposedly familiar poets and books, and also generates critical strategies for renewed engagement with American poetry traditions. As a “speaking whole” Rebound addresses a rich variety of topics: intentionality as hermeneutic; the architecture and artefacture of the book; gender identity and the book; the positioning of the book in postmodern poetics; the consequences of textual history for interpretation and reception; and the American poetry book as metonym for nation.
Contributors: Domhnall Mitchell, Eldrid Herrington, Charles Altieri, Stephen Matterson, Stephen Wilson, Maria Irene Ramalho De Sousa Santos, Ron Callan, Michael Hinds, Gareth Reeves, Lucy Collins, Justin Quinn, Nerys Williams and Nick Selby. Charles Bernstein’s “The Book as Architecture” is reprinted as an Afterword.