“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
“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
“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
“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, The Vaster Wilds
“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
“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
“Writing, it’s been said, remains unique because it is the only medium that can use its own form to investigate itself; that is, the art and the criticism that seeks to understand the art share the same ground. (Where is photography’s essay on the image? Where, for that matter, is a critique of Bach in the form of a symphony?) Lacking a discursive element, other forms must make do with implicit commentaries within themselves, something that the audience (which we will come to shortly) is left to tease out. But what of poetry? Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse attempts just that—a discursive, book-length essay composed in verse, announced by its subtitle as “a poem containing a history of poetry.”
– Jared Marcel Pollen, Poetry Foundation
“Ironically, despite a dark, if not Schwarzschild-like, cultural cosmology and a sense from his emphases that he prefers thought to poetry itself, Ruby renews my faith in the importance of poetry. He’s one of those writers whose identity is clearly entangled in the pursuit of knowledge and whose underlying tone here—a relentless, somehow joyous anxiety—seems to arise from the futility of achieving the impossible goal of knowing everything, which may also be a manifestation of the fear of death.”
– David Woo, LitHub
