The Collaborative Artist's Book:
Evolving Ideas in Contemporary Poetry and Art

University of Iowa Press
Contemporary North American Poetry Series
June 2023

2024 Honorable Mention
“MLA Prize for Contingent Faculty and Independent Scholars Winners”

Reviews

“Troubling the boundaries of their own artforms, the poets and artists who created the artists’ books brought to life in this study used the form of the book itself to create new modes of relationality and expression. Written with intelligence and an artistry of its own, The Collaborative Artist’s Book tells an exciting story about collaboration and experiment across media, and is sure to be of interest to students of experimental poetry and the avant-garde.”—Brian Glavey, author, The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis

“The Collaborative Artist’s Book reveals the ways in which collaborative artists’ books—peripheral but enduringly engaging experimental forms—shape late twentieth and early twenty-first century American lyric subjectivities. This is a book about friendship, collaboration, multidimensionality, and creative unruliness, as delightful in style as it is in subject matter.”—Rona Cran, author, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan

“Gold demonstrates the relevance of artists’ books in the present time, as complement, substitute, or remedy for virtual realities. Scrupulous in her scholarship and careful in her arguments, Gold advocates boldly for the pleasure of artists’ books, especially those containing poetry.”—Stephen Fredman, author, American Poetry as Transactional Art

MLA Prize Committee: “An attentive, detailed work, The Collaborative Artist’s Book: Evolving Ideas in Contemporary Poetry and Art is an outstanding example of the capacities of an interdisciplinary creative study. Alexandra J. Gold generates a theory of the genre of contemporary artists’ collaborative books that deftly analyzes both visual art and literature, attending to the issues of material form, tactile and curatorial challenges, and social networks. Gold’s chapters also double as a history of avant-garde art in the mid-twentieth century and the relationships that sustained it. This book is a deeply informed, passionately and beautifully written achievement. It teaches us a great deal about an understudied field, models the importance of understanding collaboration in art, and serves as a model for studies of hybrid media.”