Context Collapse

Celebrating the publication of Context Collapse (Seven Stories Press) by Ryan Ruby, poets Ryan Ruby (in from Berlin) and Bianca Stone will read from their work and join in a conversation about poetry, legacy, and history.

Join us for this special event at the Flow Chart Space!

This event will also be livestreamed through partner station WGXC/Wave Farm (“radio for open ears”).

On Context Collapse:

Literary critic Ryan Ruby uncovers the secret history of poetry in a mock-academic verse essay filled with wit and wisdom.

Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Epic in sweep, Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet—from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the American Midwest to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Cheekily introducing academic discourse, media studies, cybersemiotics, literary sociology, and heterodox economics into his blank verse study of poetry, Ruby traces the always delicate dance between poets, their publishers, and their audiences, and shows how, time and time again, the social, technological, and aesthetic experiments that appear in poetic language have prefigured radical changes to the ways of life of millions of people. It is precisely to poets to whom we ought to turn to catch a glimpse, as Shelley once put it, of the “gigantic shadows futurity casts on the present.”

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Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Bookforum, the New Left Review and elsewhere. His debut novel The Zero and the One (Twelve Books 2017) subsequently appeared in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and France. He is the author of a book-length poem, Context Collapse (Seven Stories 2024), a Finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. He is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book about Berlin called Ringbahn for Farrar Straus, and Giroux. He is the recipient of the 2023 Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation and the 2019 Einstein Fellowship from the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. He has translated Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier from the French for Readux Books. A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in Berlin, where he is on the faculty of the Berlin Writers’ Workshop and has been an Affiliate Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022) which won the 2023 Vermont Book Award in Poetry; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014) and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Nation. She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House, where she is editor-at-large for ITERANT magazine and host of Ode & Psyche Podcast.