Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Inventions on the Brink: Essays

Inventions on the Brink: Essays

Barbarese, J. T.

Paperback

Letters & EssaysLiterary CriticismPoetry Criticism

Publisher Price: $34.95

ISBN10: 0807185086
ISBN13: 9780807185087
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: Nov 13 2025
Pages: 270
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Inventions on the Brink, a collection of literary journalism by J. T. Barbarese, offers engagingly plainspoken and informed essays on American poetry from Edgar Allan Poe to the present, written by a poet with long experience in the classroom. The collection discusses writers as divergent as Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, Hart Crane and A. R. Ammons, Gerald Stern and John Prine. It includes a separate section of essays examining the craft of translation with attention to specific works translated from ancient Greek, Italian, and modern French.

A distinguishing feature of the book is that it is informed by literary theory but independent of any particular critical modality. Barbarese writes about literature for a general audience, particularly readers with wide tastes interested in engaging with literary art. His essays are the outcome of deeply reading and internalizing work he has known, studied, and admired over the course of a long career of publishing, teaching, and public lecturing.

Also from

Barbarese, J. T.

View All

Also in

Poetry Criticism

View All