Don't Read Poetry

A Book About How to Read Poems

By: Stephanie Burt

Write A Review

eBook | 21 May 2019

At a Glance

ePUB
320 Pages

Edition Type
Digital original

eBook

$35.99

or 4 interest-free payments of $9.00 with

or

Instant Digital Delivery to your Kobo Reader App

An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys--and challenges--of the genre

In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems.

A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingenues and cognoscenti alike.

Industry Reviews

"Don't Read Poetry is for readers hunting sharp, nimble thinking about culture, comprehension, and poems. Whether discussing an ancestral Hawaiian language, a canonical poet like Langston Hughes, or contemporary poets like Rodrigo Toscano and Jennifer Chang, Stephanie Burt manages to illuminate 'the difficult process of turning paired marks into words.' Don't read poetry, she suggests, read poems. This is a book for anyone who reads with curiosity, care and imagination."-Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin