John Ashbery writes in “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” that experiencing a poem is:

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

Ashbery’s poem points to that feeling of being just on the verge of knowing, and even for a moment knowing, something the poem has told us, something vital. But before you can hold on to that knowledge, it is gone, at least until you read the poem again. The experience of getting close to the unsayable and feeling it, and how we are brought to that place beyond words by words themselves, is the subject of this book.