Marjorie Perloff is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is the author of numerous books, including Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991), Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), and Poetry On and Off the Page (1998). She is considered to be one of the most distinguished critics now writing on twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

• List of Plates. Acknowledgments.Introduction.1 Avant-Garde Eliot.2 Gertrude Stein’s Differential Syntx.3 The Conceptual Poetics of Marcel Duchamp.4 Khlebnikov’s Soundscapes: Letter, Number, and the Poetics of Zaum.5 “Modernism” at the Millennium.Notes.Bibliography.Index.

"Perloff's newest work offers refreshingly frank, controversial, and even inspiring ideas ... Perloff's readings refuse to reaffirm orthodoxies, presenting innovative perspectives on poets, early modernism and its relation to the current scene. Far from being a reactionary call to return to the past, Perloff's work envisions a bold continuation of modernism's earlier revolutionary impulses. 21st-Century Modernism is vital and necessary reading for anyone interested in the history of modern poetry and where it is going." PN Review "The book commands respect, [...], not only for its energy and the precision of its readings, but for its refusal to surrender powers of arbitration from the artist to the teacher or theorist." Times Literary Supplement "The heart of [Perloff's] book is her enthusiasm - a well-researched and carefully argued enthusiasm" The Virginia Quarterly Review