My book length verse essay, CONTEXT COLLAPSE is now forthcoming in November from Seven Stories Press in the US and the UK.
You find the links to order it here...
...and read excerpts here (The Oxonian Review) here (Statorec) and here (The Drift).
Named one of the 20 BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2024 by Publisher’s Weekly
In Context Collapse, literary critic Ryan Ruby uncovers the secret history of poetry in a mock-academic verse essay filled with wit and wisdom.
Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Epic in sweep, Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet—from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the American Midwest to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Cheekily introducing academic discourse, media studies, cybersemiotics, literary sociology, and heterodox economics into his blank verse study of poetry, Ruby traces the always delicate dance between poets, their publishers, and their audiences, and shows how, time and time again, the social, technological, and aesthetic experiments that appear in poetic language have prefigured radical changes to the ways of life of millions of people. It is precisely to poets to whom we ought to turn to catch a glimpse, as Shelley once put it, “of the gigantic shadows futurity casts on the present.”
Reviews of CONTEXT COLLAPSE
Ruby’s perceptions are often delightful, as are his skilled modulations among literary, spoken, and academic idioms. Context Collapse may get as close as an ink-and-paper object can to the multidirectional, multidimensional rabbit-hole experience of the digital world. —Daisy Fried, The New York Times
Ruby, an American critic, translator and novelist, is much respected in his field, and has pulled off the most unlikely elevator-pitch of all time. As a poem in itself, Context Collapse is a quixotic undertaking…Mercifully, Ruby is an exceptional and eloquent guide through the poetic underworld…Context Collapse is something generous and constructive. —Luke Kennard, The Telegraph (Five Star Review)
Literary critic Ruby (The Zero and the One) delivers a dazzling and ambitious “verse essay” tracing the history of poetry from Homer through the present…This literary history stands in a class all its own.” —Publisher’s Weekly (Starred)
The closest analogue I can think of to Ruby’s project is Jean-Luc Godard’s eight-part video series Histoire(s) du cinéma. —Jared Marcel Pollen, POETRY
Ryan Ruby’s delightfully weird and bracingly ambitious first poetry book, Context Collapse…renews my faith in poetry.” —David Woo, LitHub
Context Collapse a work that is, in the best sense, provocative. —M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review
While I’m familiar with that feeling of disappointment when a hot new book just doesn’t live up to the hype, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book meeting, if not exceeding, the praise already being heaped upon it. —Aiden Hunt, New Pages
Ruby’s long poem…is an impressive accomplishment, a dazzling display of critical acumen; a daring, iconoclastic tour-de-force. I have found it to be edifying on page after page, and simultaneously hard to put down. —Henry Gould, Mississippi Cicada
In which the ghosts of Alfred Lord and Milman Parry return to guide a copiously annotated, loosely pentameter mock-academic romp through a few thousand years of “Western” poetry. —V. Joshua Adams, Annulet Journal
A self-proclaimed “poem containing a history of poetry,” from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic’s favorite literary critic. —The Millions, Most Anticipated: The Great Fall 2024 Preview
Praise for CONTEXT COLLAPSE
“An epic on the history of poetry may seem an unlikely project, but this delightfully witty (and erudite) romp through poetry and its technologies works up to a sobering, urgent, apocalyptic conclusion.”—Rosmarie Waldrop, author of The Nick of Time
“It seems impossible that Context Collapse is as wildly erudite and incredibly fun as it is. What a grand survey of poetry, in poetry! I’m envious of Ryan Ruby for succeeding so brilliantly with this bold and cheeky (and frankly insane) project.” —Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
“Ryan Ruby has written a daring kind of essay. The verse text and verse footnotes conflate and flail, destabilizing and stylizing one another like conjoined twins.” —Don Mee Choi, author of DMZ Colony
“Context Collapse is an erudite and a perceptive essay in the form of a poem, which traces the history of poetry from ancient orality to the electronic age. Using both the line and the footnote in a self-referential and sophisticated performance, it argues that what poetry is depends on the economic, social and technological conditions of its production.” —Eugene Ostashevsky, author of The Feeling Sonnets
“Reader! In this book, you are sitting for a family portrait. Ryan Ruby has written a poem of poetry’s audience, from first song by firelight to the cool blue of the computer screen. The story he tells is learned, witty, bright with shards of lyric; a surreptitious media theory by turns elegiac and inspiring. You will see your self here, and we can see each other, and all of us can remember how good it gets when humans pay attention to what humans make.” —Jeff Dolven, author of Senses of Style and *A New English Grammar
“With perverse, provocative persistence, Ryan Ruby shores a fragmentary history of the ancient technology of poetry against its modern ruins. Poetry’s audience, he argues, is hastily going the way of all flesh—a context that renders his Herculean labor futile. How, then, does Ruby manage to make his verse essay so very compelling? What does its propulsive power and persuasiveness tell us not only about what poetry can do, but also about ourselves? These are the stimulating and, indeed, pressing questions posed by Context Collapse, an ars poetica like no other.” —Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood
“What a joy it is to think alongside Ryan Ruby. In Context Collapse, critical argument and literary history become sensuous and playful, provocative in the best sense and, by the end, deeply moving.” —Phil Klay, author of Redeployment