I was very excited to learn that my book, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture, has been named an “Outstanding Academic Title for 2017” by Choice, the magazine of the Association of College & Research Libraries.

According to the website: “Every year in the January issue, in print and online, Choice publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.”

The College of Arts and Sciences at Florida State University, where I teach, was kind enough to post this article about the recognition:

English professor’s book named one of ‘Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017’

A Florida State University professor’s book on the rise of “experimental realism” in modern poetry is making waves in the academic world.

Andrew Epstein, a professor in FSU’s Department of English and associate chair of the department’s graduate English program, is the author of Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture. The book, published by Oxford University Press, was recently named one of the “Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017” by Choice, a magazine of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL).

In awarding Outstanding Academic Titles, Choice editors apply several criteria to review titles:

• Overall excellence in presentation and scholarship
• Importance relative to other literature in the field
• Distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
• Originality or uniqueness of treatment
• Value to undergraduate students
• Importance in building undergraduate library collections

Being named to this list is a prestigious accomplishment, as it is often influential in determining which books libraries will purchase. Epstein’s book has also made the shortlist for another top award in his field: the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.

“After spending years of hard work researching and writing a book, it’s very gratifying to know that people are reading it and finding it interesting and useful,” Epstein said. “I’m especially glad that the book seems to be reaching people beyond just academic experts in my area of specialty, because I think the problems and issues I discuss — about attention and distraction in the age of the smartphone, the complexity and appeal of the everyday, how art forms can capture the daily, and so on — are topics of broad interest and urgent concern in our culture today.”

Attention Equals Life examines why modern poetry and other art forms have become so preoccupied with representing the ordinary and humble experience of daily life.

“Rather than focusing on grand subjects, timeless themes and sublime beauty, contemporary poets, and many other writers and artists, have been much more invested in documenting and capturing the everyday and mundane,” Epstein said. “I view this turn to the daily as a response to the rapid transformations that have characterized the period since 1945, which have resulted in a culture of distraction and information overload. My book argues that poetry has become an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that responds to, and tries to resist, a culture suffering from an acute crisis of attention.”

Gary Taylor, chair of the Department of English, praised Epstein, saying his book “really does make the ordinary extraordinary.

“Although Andrew Epstein is a theorist and observer of everyday experience, there is nothing quotidian about his achievement.”

Writing in Choice, reviewer J.A. Zoller stated, “A book of enormous breadth and ambition, Attention Equals Life is at once astonishing and reaffirming, challenging and clarifying. It engages more broadly than its scholarly focus would suggest.

“. . . This book has something for everyone — poets, critics, teachers of literature and contemporary culture, fans of contemporary poetry, and even those who think that no poetry of value has emerged in the U.S. since Robert Frost,” Zoller added.

Taylor described Epstein as a tremendous resource for the English department, as “he is exceptionally valuable in linking the Graduate Program in Literature, Media and Culture to the Graduate Program in Creative Writing.” In addition, he credited Epstein with being instrumental in bringing the nationally acclaimed poet and critic Stephanie Burt to the university, where she gave both a poetry reading and a critical lecture on the relationship between poetry and song.

A few months ago, I was pleased to learn that my book Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Book Prize for 2016, one of the most important prizes in my field.  My book was selected along with 4 other terrific books for this year’s short list.  In their commendation, the MSA Book Prize committee wrote:

Attention Equals Life is the culmination of work from the past several years on modernism and the everyday, particularly American poetry moving toward the mid-century. The book is extremely readable for broad audiences and makes a compelling extension of discussions of the everyday, both from an American standpoint and with a focus on mid-century literary production. The nuanced attention to poetic language is convincing and the theoretical and philosophical argumentation is bested only by detailed analyses of poems, which are frequent and efficient. Close attention to the text itself is always diligently related to the American philosophical tradition so that textual analyses do not operate as mere illustrations but signal a new step in scholarship. This study challenges our perception of poetry as a genre and as a form – it raises new questions in terms of poetics, aesthetics, and ethics, and particularly how poetry works as a form of cultural and political action. Attention Equals Life is a completely convincing work.

For more about the prize, see here.