A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line
 “Whether oral or written, ancient or modern, from one hemisphere or another, most poetry has organized itself in basic units that English calls lines. In their energetic collection of brief essay-sprints, Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee offer us nearly seventy contemporary writers’ thoughts about poetic lines. The result is a rich and glorious variety of insights and formulations, lavishly inclusive and resolutely uncommitted to any single orthodoxy. The editors’ forthright introduction is illuminating, judicious, and open-handed. This is a book that anyone drawn to the study of poetic form and its largest meanings should know.”—Stephen Cushman, author,Riffraff, and editor,Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics  “A Broken Thingis a lovely, useful, and well-conceived book. From the introduction’s astute and informative discussions of the historical embeddedness of tussles over the poetic line in poetry to the essays thereafter, readers and writers will be made aware that there is, as Rosko and Vander Zee note, no consensus, an awareness that can be vital for ayoung poet.A Broken Thinggathers the arguments and exchanges of the day. It does not offer essays that correct or offer definitive approaches to the line; on the contrary, it gathers the hubbub of voices that any critical approach would need to take into account.”—Lisa Steinman, author,Made in America,Masters of Repetition,andInvitation to Poetryand coeditor,Hubbub