Contributor: Nathan Brown Nathan Brown is Professor of English at Concordia University, Montréal, where he is founding director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the translator of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (Verso, 2024) and the author of Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (Fordham, 2021) and The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (Fordham, 2017).

What are the materials of poetic writing? How are they configured? And how are we able to track in and after modernism the way avant-garde poetics stretched the limits of poetry’s material form? Nathan Brown’s outstanding and challenging The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics attempts to answer these questions, offering a powerful revisionist literary history of the legacy of modernism’s scrutiny of the very matter of poetry. --- Brown's work here opens many promising new paths to follow. --- This book is a major achievement for its exposition of nanoscience, for its powerful engagements with Martin Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben on the topic of “life,” and for its general analysis of how the figure of the engineer-scientist provides contexts by which to understand what contemporary writers have achieved.---Charles Altieri, American Literary History --- ...The Limits of Fabrication is a serious and critically acute book... Many readers will be unfamiliar with at least some of the poets here, and Brown makes a compelling case for why they should be read by critics with interests in the intersections between literature and science. --- This is one of the very finest works of speculative poetics to emerge in quite some time, and one hopes that its highly creative deviations from the historicist-contextualist hegemony in literary studies will spark equally incandescent acts of theoretical disobedience in its wake. --- In this ambitious and exciting book, Nathan Brown aligns two practices that occur at the limits of fabrication: one, at play in scenes of reading and writing, involves the poet’s ability to structure language mark by mark; the other, at play in materials research and manufacture, involves the nanoscientist’s ability to manipulate matter atom by atom. These forms of making open an understanding of the methods, techniques, and procedures that structure the world we now inhabit. Unfolding across five carefully sequenced chapters, the book concludes with a brilliant reading of Mad Science in Imperial City, a volume of poems by the engineer and poet who provides Brown’s epigraph and sets the scale for his important expansion of materialist poetics. 'Work nano,' Shanxing Wang urges, 'think cosmologic.' The Limits of Fabrication shows us how such a feat might be accomplished.---—Adalaide Morris, The University of Iowa --- Poems are material things. From that simple observation, Nathan Brown teases out startling sequellae: experimental poetry is materials research, and materials science – in its concern with form and organization – is a branch of poetics. In the language of materials science, Brown’s synthesis – of poetry, philosophy, and nanotechnology – is imaginative, while his characterizations are rigorous and enlightening.---—Cyrus Mody, Rice University --- The Limits of Fabrication brings an essential argument to discussions concerning the end of art. Where Hegel affirms that poetry accomplishes the dematerialization of aesthetic expression by reducing it to linguistic transparency, Brown on the contrary demonstrates that a poem is always a factory, where meaning is fashioned, even if invisibly, through the crystals, quanta, or nanotubes of language. No metaphorical abstraction in this, but the revelation of the elementary technology at work in words. A strikingly singular, beautiful, and important book.---—Catherine Malabou, author of The New Wounded