"Students need textbooks like this, to show them the range of poetry's pleasures and to guide them toward becoming better readers and writers. But educators need them too, to provide models for how to present our artform with all the rigour it deserves while still making room for questions, affection, and wit. Susan Holbrook is a wonderful teacher--contemporary, diverse in her tastes, wearing her erudition lightly, and pointing out pathways rather than giving directions. I won't be the only reader who is grateful to have learned from her." -- Adam Sol, Victoria College, University of Toronto

"How to Read (and Write About) Poetry is a consummate guide to the rich, nuanced field of poetry. For nervous novitiates, it demystifies the artform and provides an array of practical points of access. Holbrook is a wonderful, welcoming guide. For more comfortable poetry readers, pedagogues, and poets, this book presents a skilful demonstration of how to talk about poetic language without killing it. Indeed, this is no exegesis as exhumation herein: you will find no dust upon the carefully curated poems chosen from across the field. With language itself as the loamy soil, you can almost feel her bringing the poems alive, until they pulse with life and mystery as she guides readers through their lush wildness." -- Gregory Betts, Brock University

"In this approachable and compelling collection, Susan Holbrook gathers together traditional sonnets and irascible ones, the choicest concrete texts and resounding poems for the ear, the well-wrought urns, and a veritable playground of repetition, apostrophe, enjambment, and metonymy." -- Nicole Markotic, University of Windsor