Product Review

For decades Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms has been standard in the libraries of writers, teachers, scholars, and others who care about the craft of poetry. Now Turco has expanded and updated “the poet’s bible” once again, this time incorporating a collection of “odd and invented forms,” which adds many interesting ancient and modern prosodies and forms with new examples written by contemporary poets old and young. Turco presents “The Rules of Scansion,” discusses the “levels” of poetry—the typographical, the sonic, the sensory, and the ideational—and proffers the ever-useful “Form-Finder Index.”