Reviews

“Christina Pugh proposes lyric as a mode of cognition: a haunted, sonorous, and echoing form of knowing in which poetic form, critical inquiry, and temporal sensitivity become inseparable acts of listening. ‘Poetry exploits both syntax and sonority. What is under the spotlight, what is foregrounded, what is backgrounded? Or what is virtual?’ So asks the author in her compelling, insistently ambivalent collection of essays, Ghosts and the Overplus: Reading Poetry in the Twenty-First Century, a book that quietly resists the false binary between poetic practice and critical inquiry. . . .

Ghosts and the Overplus is more than a collection of essays: it is an epistemology of lyric. It asks how poetry means, how lyric enacts cognition through cadence, silence, and verbal ‘afterlife.’ Pugh shows how lyric knows, how it teaches us to know, and how we might learn to listen better. She reminds us that the act of reading poetry is never a retreat from the world—it is a reinvestment in its myriad contradictions. This collection renews the reality of what has been done in the poetry of the past, and thereby points to what is possible in contemporary poetry.”

—Nicholas Skaldetvind, Restless Messengers: Poetry in Review

“Elegance, restraint, conviction, and a quiet authority have always been the hallmarks of Christina Pugh’s remarkable prose; she brings a delicate intellectual acuity to her essays which is made capacious by her compassionate wisdom. Reading Christina Pugh’s essays I’m always astonished by the subtle yet deeply profound intimacy in her writing. With this collection, Christina Pugh has joined poets David Baker, Robert Hass, and Rosanna Warren as one of the most compelling essayists we have in American poetry. I treasure this book.”

—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

“A spirited, nonconformist book. Christina Pugh has been covering the waterfront of poetry in English for years as poet, critic, teacher, and editor, and her essays rise from those rambles. She reads Dickinson and Bishop against the fashionable grain, plucks at the notion of ‘mainstream poetry,’ and brings us up close to Jonson, Milton, Stevens, Milosz, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ed Roberson, and others in prose both sensuous and precise. A rich adventure of poetic discovery.”

—Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems

“Pugh’s is the freshest, most rigorous voice in contemporary reviewing.”

—Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy

“As Pugh shows, American lyric poets offer dense, elegant, and fierce language to lean into . . . Recommended.”

—Choice