In The Poetry of Bob Dylan, editor Mike Chasar has gathered thirty virtuosic readings of individual Dylan songs by leading scholars in the fields of poetry and poetics, sound studies, and popular culture. In illuminating what the Nobel prize committee calls Dylan's “poetic expressions,” these smart and engaging analytical essays move beyond the fantasy of poetry as a detached page-bound relic. Instead, they provide us with a guide to the multiple ways we listen to, store, playback-and play with-literary objects. Appropriate for both long-time researchers and readers new to these fields, this book is a key entry in the study of Bob Dylan's work and a powerful introduction to the expanded literary field of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

John Melillo, Associate Professor of English, University of Arizona, USA

The Poetry of Bob Dylan constitutes a much-needed literary reckoning with specific important works from across Dylan's working life as a writer. These thirty brief essays, carefully composed by thirty different literary scholars concerning thirty distinct songs, speak not only to a new generation of Dylan students and listeners but also to the future-a future that will relate to these songs as the artistic creations of a great poet.

Robert Boschman, Professor of American Literature, Mount Royal University, Canada