Abstract
From the perspectives of both literary form and the history of the book, volumes of gathered poetry illustrate the fundamental incoherence of handpress-era texts. This essay considers the flexible web of connections in poetic miscellanies as an imaginative response to that basic disorder. Reading the organization of two editions of George Gascoigne’s work, it explores the dynamic exchanges between poems and commercial textual features and finds in those feedback loops an ambitious projection of the larger form of the book. Far from a simple or inherent unity, this paratactic structure uses poetry to span the physical juxtapositions of books made by diverse agents of the press. By forging an inferential engagement with the design of the volume, Gascoigne resisted a system of publication bent on dispersing his writing and folded nonauthorial devices into the most elemental workings of poetic form.
