RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksNowak’s inspiring new book of essays on the politics and social forms of community-based writing,...gathers together a variety of collective writing practices...to highlight the communal creativity of workers’ workshops. Moving between extended descriptions of such workshop communities and their collaborative methods and broader historical sketches situating these writing activities within social movements in the United States and beyond, Nowak develops a textured account of what he terms \'social poetics\' ... [a] capacious chronicling of the radical ideas and practices that connect writing workshops across various social contexts in the past half-century ... testifies to the vibrant presence of a global worker culture by centering these worker writers’ perspectives in all their complexity ... Through this sustained attention to these writers’ complex imaginative acts, Nowak’s passionate and galvanizing essays direct practitioners, readers, and critics of poetry to attend to the cultural life of contemporary poetic practice beyond the orbit of what Nowak calls the \'committed author.\' ... The book is designed not only to describe social poetics in action but to nurture its continued flourishing in other communities, inspiring future forms of social poetics ... On the page and beyond, Nowak’s commitment to the \'first-person plural\' offers an urgent, much-needed social vision for poetry today.
