PositiveKenyon ReviewBurt is an apt guide for this moment, because her criticism has often included both historical sweep and skepticism about history’s conventional distinctions ... Her defense of poetry is both remarkably traditional and applicable ... Even those who find some of Burt’s statements about exploratory poetics \'oversimplified, sometimes inaccurate, and unfair,\' a risk she acknowledges in Close Calls, may find the new book useful in an introductory setting ... Don’t Read Poetry is a useful work of disaggregation...[and] shows what that imagining can look like and why it can matter.
