No Medium
"Craig Dworkin's social formalist commentaries and compendia are among the most telling works of criticism in our time. Both provocative and mesmerizing, Dworkin's detailed readings of forms, structures, and bibliographic codes (rather than themes and subject matter), with special attention to potentially unnoticed discrepancies, elucidates the warp and woof of a series of hard-core and uncanny art practices in which the 'remove of literature' (erasure of signal, voiding of medium, foregrounding of paratext) opens the floodgates of a sublimely nude poetics of blank: the noise of silence." --Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania; author ofAttack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions"Like Wallace Stevens' snow man, who parses 'nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,' Craig Dworkin faces up to this exquisite challenge, following the lead of an old Provençal lyric 'to make a poetry of pure nothing.' With a mental agility commensurate with every unlikelihood it encounters, Dworkin is a connoisseur of details even where none would seem to exist. His keen eye (and ear) for the materiality behind non-appearance is a marvel: he is the Barnum of a peculiar new circus calledNo Medium." --Jed Rasula, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English, University of Georgia, author ofModernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth"When Craig Dworkin'sReading the Illegibleappeared in 2003 it immediately became a seminal contribution to poetic discourse, one that I would read alongside Charles Olson'sCall Me Ishmael, Susan Howe'sMy Emily Dickinson, Charles Bernstein'sContent's Dream, and Jerome McGann'sBlack Riders. I've been looking forward to reading his next book ever since, and here it is,No Medium. No poet-critic today is writing with as much immediacy, economy, precision, and vitality as Craig Dworkin. And no one writes a more inspiring endnote -- don't skip 'em!" --Kyle Schlesinger, Assistant Professor of Publishing, University of Houston-Victoria"No Mediumis not only an admirable feat of painstaking research that puts into conversation an impressive range of artworks, both famous and obscure, but also a testament to the fact that for the industrious critic encountering an apparent absence there is always something interesting to say." --Michael Leong,Hyperallergic"Dworkin's study of apparent anomalies that turn out to be representative exemplars rather than quirky curiosities is well worth attention." --Johanna Drucker,Los Angeles Review of Books