The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein presents scholarship on one of the USA's best living innovative poets. Scholars explore major themes in his work, and poets present pieces inspired by his poetry. The book is intended for both scholars looking for informed critical insight into Bernstein's work as well as for students to examine his work.

What we have here is the ideal Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Charles Bernstein: the coverage is wide, & all you need is "to be ready, not prepared." You will not be asked to lounge on the couch as nobody remembers its colors, but the essays come in all colors, except sad. Enjoy, & then get back to the poems. -- Pierre Joris A major poet for our time - & then some - Charles Bernstein has emerged as a principal voice -maybe the best we have - for an international avant-garde now in its second century of visions & revisions. It is in celebration of this that the Salt Companion to his work appears here, to show him in a trajectory from an American-centered language poetry in the 1970s to an active & significant relation to a constantly renewing & expanding global poetry in which his singularity has played a vital role. What becomes clear in these pages is how his generosity of mind & spirit continues to enrich us all. -- Jerome Rothenberg

William Allegrezza Introduction Caroline Bergvall Charles Bernstein or an Insistence to Communicate Tim Peterson Either You're With Us and Against Us: Charles Bernstein's Girly Man, 9/11, and the Brechtian Figure of the Reader mIEKAL aND The Cave Children of New York Are Never Free Michael Eng The Metaphysical Mouth and the Asylum of the Everyday: Charles Bernstein and Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Language Madeline Gins Voluming Dimensionalizing Gazoop What Gazoop Gazoop In A Restless World Like This Gazoop Kimberly Lamm Girly Men Ballads: (Il)legible Identities in Charles Bernstein and Gertrude Stein Lars Palm That Poem For Charles Bernstein Steven Salmoni "Spectres of Benjamin": (Re)presentation and (Re)semblance in Charles Bernstein's Shadowtime Steve McCaffery What As Poetic Megan Swihart Jewell Taking on the Official Voice: Charles Bernstein's Poetic Sophistry and Post-Process Writing Pedagogy Ron Silliman From The Alphabet Paul Stephens Beyond the Valley of the Sophist: Charles Bernstein, Irony, and Solidarity Ray Craig Poem for Charles Jason Lagapa To Think Figuratively, Tropically: Charles Bernstein's Post-9/11 Grammar and Pragmatist Lessons in the Age of Baudrillard Peter Monacell Charles Bernstein's Anti-Suburban Poetry Donald Wellman Some Nouns Carlos Gallego From a Philosophy of Poetry to Poetry as Philosophy: The Dialectical Poetics of Charles Bernstein Michael Angelo Tata Content's Profusion: Noise, Interruption and Reverse Peristalsis in the poetics of Charles Bernstein Kristen Gallagher Charles Bernstein in Buffalo 1999-2004 Thomas Fink Charles Bernstein's Catalogue Poetry Allen Fisher Readdressing Constructivism and Conceptual Art: aspects of work factured by Charles Bernstein Maggie O'Sullivan circles from which James Shivers Visual Strategies: a Line, a Verse, Something on Paper Erica Hunt After Residual Rubbernecking (a speculative non-serial anti-romance) Michael S. Hennessey A Life, Spliced: On the Early Tapeworks of Charles Bernstein Notes on Contributors Credits Acknowledgements