Book Review :: Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby
Review by Aiden Hunt
Fans of literary criticism and poetry have likely heard the buzz surrounding poet-scholar Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry, published by Seven Stories Press in November 2024. While I’m familiar with that feeling of disappointment when a hot new book just doesn’t live up to the hype, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book meeting, if not exceeding, the praise already being heaped upon it.
Ruby fills his epic poem about the history of poetry with plenty of footnotes—also presented as verse—explicating clever allusions to moments in the history of poetry and poetics through more detailed asides and famous quotes. With the exception of the prose prologue titled, “Razo” and the epilogue final section, “Tornada,” written in tercets, every other page contains footnotes on the right juxtaposed with one to twenty-nine lines of poetry on the preceding page, weaving text and subtext together in a feat that recalled to my mind Junot Diaz’s award-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Readers uninterested in footnotes and looking up literary quotes in various languages including French, Mandarin, Latin, and Ancient Greek might find the book not to their tastes. However, while this poem may be a challenge to consume, Ruby’s witty, often cheeky allusions to linguistic history pay intellectual dividends for the effort. First thought, best thought: While the subject may be too specialized to interest all readers, Context Collapse is educational, entertaining, and edifying, particularly for poetry enthusiasts.
Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry by Ryan Ruby. Seven Stories Press, November 2024.
Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator, editor, and publisher of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and his reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fugue, On the Seawall, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among others.
