Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

Charles Bernstein has described conceptual "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors such s Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp through major avant-garde groups of the past century, including Dada, Oulipo, Fluxus, and language poetry, to name just a few. The works of more than a hundred writers from Aasprong to Zykov demonstrate a remarkable variety of new ways of thinking about the nature of texts, information, and art, using found, appropriated, and randomly generated texts to explore the possibilities of non-expressive language.

Craig Dowrkin is the author of Reading the Illegible, also published by North-western University Press, and the editor of Architectures of Poetry, Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writing of Vito Acconci, The Consequence of Innovation: Twenty-first Century Poetics, and, with Marjorie Perloff, The Sound of Poetry | The Poetry of Sound.
Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called "some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by Publisher Weekly. Gold-smith is the author of ten books of poetry. He teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive.