“It is delightful to watch Jahan Ramazani do what he does best: delve into poets such as Hopkins, Yeats, Heaney, and Muldoon and show us the nitty-gritty of how their verse works. Anyone who loves poetry is going to come away from this book revitalized, prepared to think complexly about the modes of address that poets employ, as well as the kinds of writing that they habitually echo, distort, take apart, and reassemble.”
— Brian M. Reed, University of Washington
“Jahan Ramazani is that rare critic who has read and understood a wide range of contemporary theory but is also a strong close reader, bringing his arguments alive through example. Poetry and Its Others is a capstone of the work he has done so far, combining his interests in genre, hybridity, and dialogism; his remarkably wide, global knowledge of modern poetry in English; and his commitment to poetry as a distinctive lens and language by which to encounter the world. This impressive and richly suggestive book moves through so many large areas of poetic dialogue and reciprocity with other forms that it will be important to poetry lovers both in and outside academia.”
— Bonnie Costello, Boston University
"Ramazani casts much light on the question of what poetry is—or perhaps what it does. . . . [H]is approach opens new possibilities for reconsidering how poems. . . are in dialogue with philosophy or with contemporary writing about the visual arts."
— Lisa M. Steinman, Wallace Stevens Journal
“Illuminating analyses of a diverse set of poems. . . . Recommended.”
— Choice
“After considering the historical contexts and thematic ties between works of different genres, [Ramazani] swoops in on passages of rich complexity and allusiveness, seizing the kernel of poetic distinctiveness. . . . Against a background of nonpoetry, the specific features that make poetry recognizable suddenly stand out.”
— Twentieth-Century Literature
“A wide-ranging affair that travels throughout the English-speaking world and is as engaged with the contemporary as it is with the established canon. . . . Marrying methodology and content, Poetry and Its Others becomes the rich and varied thing it sets out to consider.”
— Time Present: The Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society
"Like a poem, Ramazani’s book converses with us, and then quietly leaves us, so we can ponder the consequences on our own."
— English Studies