In a study that is at once thorough and highly engaging, Acquisto convincingly demonstrates how poetry has come to transform modern doubt into a creative force--an endless movement toward understanding that, in refusing certitude, is the richer for remaining open to possibility. His concluding reflections on the potential for fostering community are especially timely in this regard, in an era of informational impatience and deadlocked political discourse.

Scott Shinabargar, Professor of French and Chair, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Winthrop University, USA

This is not just a brilliant book that unravels French poetics for specialists and non-specialists alike, but one that gives us invaluable heuristic tools--what Chamoiseau called 'poecepts'--to approach most other literary traditions related to modernism, across cultures and languages. Joseph Acquisto gracefully elucidates how French thought (Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, and Rancière in particular) is conveyed through (and intertwined with) poetics and how poetry's most profound knowledge is also poetry's refusal to impose itself as an absolute form of knowing: 'Poetry is thus that song that you cannot grab, that space where you cannot dwell, that key you must always keep on losing' (Philippe Jaccottet).

Hugues Azerad, Fellow and College Lecturer in French, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, UK

Acquisto's sustained meditation on modern poetry’s productive, rather than aporetic, engagement with ignorance delivers a surprise: self-reflexivity, in the form of poetry’s restless self-definitional impulse, connects, rather than disconnects, poetry and the world. This incisive study is as deeply-searching as the poetic works it reads.

Claire Chi-ah Lyu, Associate Professor of French, University of Virginia, USA