Radium of the Word
A Poetics of Materiality
264 pages
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21 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2020
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
One The Prosaic Imagination
Two The Onomastic Imagination
Three The Logic of the Work (on P. Inman)
Four The Logic of Print (on Russell Atkins)
Five The Logic of Spacing (on N. H. Pritchard)
Six The Logic of Registration (on Andy Warhol)
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Notes
Index
Review Quotes
Virginia Jackson, University of California, Irvine
“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.”
Charles Bernstein, author of 'Near/Miss' and 'Topsy-Turvy'
“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.”
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Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature | General Criticism and Critical Theory
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