Description:
Wall Street Journal -- "What to Read: 10 Best Books of February"
Blending biography and archival history, After the Flood asks of Bob Dylan, "If your dreams are fulfilled at twenty, what do you do with the rest of your life?"
Brief description: Robert Polito served as president of the Poetry Foundation from 2013 to 2015. The founding director of the Graduate Writing and Writing and Democracy Programs at the New School, Polito teaches writing and literature. For his book Savage Art, he was awarded the NBCC Award in Biography.
Review Quotes: In Robert Polito's hands, Bob Dylan's recordings, performances, films, and writings, especially of the last thirty-some years, open up like plants caught in time-lapse photography. You see how they take shape, hear the different languages they speak, until the maze of allusions that makes up the work resolves itself into a single body--in Colson Whitehead's words on all the variants of 'John Henry, ' 'a whole country of songs.'--Greil Marcus