Preorder Now: MAKE IT BROKEN by Patrick Pritchett

After the disaster of World War II, Ezra Pound’s exhortation to poets to “make it new” lay in shambles. The essays in MAKE IT BROKEN assert that a certain group of poets, taking their cue from both Pound and George Oppen, employed modernist strategies of interruption, negation, and seriality to recharge poetry with a moral acuity and formal audacity. By writing from inside the ruins, poets like Michael Palmer, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, and Fanny Howe use the very brokenness of language to redeem the poem in the wake of catastrophe.