Radium of the Word

“We count on Dworkin to say the smartest things about contemporary poetics, so the smartness of Radium of the Word comes as no surprise. What does come as a surprise is the book's first sentence: ‘This book proposes a methodology.’ And it does not disappoint. Dworkin is reinventing the practice of reading by unscrewing the locks on its doors. Not close, not distant, not surface, not formal, not historical, not reparative, not paranoid reading. This book bypasses adjectives and heads straight for the nouns: the death penalty, paper cuts, opera queens, gossip, songs, riots, print, quotation marks, homelessness, names, the typeset line, spaces, prose. Oh, and poetry. This is a difficult book that everybody should read.” * Virginia Jackson, University of California, Irvine *
“Dworkin is the closest reader we have. In startling, revelatory, and delightful essays on an astonishing range of writers and artists, Dworkin resists the systematic and canonical in pursuit of the peculiar, specific, and particular. Radium of the Word proposes a radically new approach to reading poetry, focusing on textual features that are not necessarily intentional. This book will be of importance to scholars of modernist and avant-garde literature, postwar African American poetry, and anyone interested in contemporary poetics.” * Charles Bernstein, author of 'Near/Miss' and 'Topsy-Turvy' *
"At a moment when claims for the thematic achievements of poetic language (cognitive mapping, climate graphing, racial and sexual tracking, worldmaking, self constructing, cultural undoing, consciousness raising, history transcending) are even more extreme than they were two years ago when this book came out, we have never needed Dworkin’s weird lens on poetry more." -- Virginia Jackson * Critical Inquiry *