Stitch, Unstitch

Reviews / Votes

How is writing poetry like labor? Kristin Grogan's Stitch, Unstitch looks at this enduring question with fresh eyes. Focusing on literary modernism and its long afterlife, she demonstrates how a wide range of twentieth-century poets devised nimble poetic strategies for understanding the conditions of work that avoided blind celebrations of technology and uncritical nostalgia for imagined pasts. Stitch, Unstitch is a truly clarifying study of an ancient analogy. -- Christopher Nealon, author of <i>Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital</i> Through brilliant, expansive readings and careful archival analysis, Stitch, Unstitch illuminates the ways modernist texts investigate the varied sites and meanings of labor, including the work of poetry itself. Placing new interpretive focus on elements of social reproduction and unwaged work as central to modernist aesthetic and political horizons, Grogan offers an indispensable account of modernist poetry's continuing potential for imagining life within and beyond waged work. -- Margaret Ronda, author of <i>Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End</i> Stitch, Unstitch brings into focus forms of value obscured by capitalism's imperative to work for a living. Through beautiful readings and ingenious arguments, Grogan uncovers a new history of modernist poetry's engagements with the everyday life of labor to offer glimpses of a world beyond the lockstep demands of work. -- Brian Glavey, author of <i>The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis</i> With unstinting research and careful attention, Grogan details modernist poetry's self-conscious takes on labor, from Ezra Pound's dangerously abstracted conceptions of poetry as craft to Lorine Niedecker's revaluation of women's work as apparently 'unproductive' labor, not unlike the writing of poetry. Offering us rewarding new lenses for reading canonical figures like Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein while also pulling the understudied Lola Ridge into focus, this book recasts the work of poetry and the poetry of work. -- Evie Shockley, Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University