On Poetry and Punctuation

At the New York Times, Elisa Gabbert considers the role of punctuation in two books of poetry published this year: THRESHOLES (Coffee House) by Lara Mimosa Montes and Thrown in the Throat (Milkweed) by Benjamin Garcia. Gabbert notes: "Punctuation often serves to force a pause, but the pause isn’t silence." Reading on from there: 

In several new books I read over the past year, poets use punctuation and extra-linguistic symbols, like asterisks and other section markers (such a marker may be called an asterism or fleuron or dinkus, depending on its styling), to conjure nonverbal meaning and nonverbal sound. THRESHOLES (Coffee House, 112 pp., paper, $16.95), by Lara Mimosa Montes, makes use of a novel glyph, known in book design as an ornament: a little outline of a circle that appears between fragments, some of which are verse, usually an isolated line or two; some of which are prose, an essayistic paragraph or a few in a row; and some of which are attributed quotes, as in a commonplace book. In some cases, Montes uses a single circle as a divider; in others, a series of three, like a vertical ellipsis. These ornaments function like punctuation at the level of the full text, rather than the phrase or the sentence.

Learn more at NYT.