This invigorating collection of twelve original essays is dedicated to the memory of a great Shakespearean, Russ McDonald. It is an appropriate tribute. As a group, the essays exemplify many of the critical approaches to which these poems have proven hospitable, all the while attending to the distinctive formal features of a sonnet, and of a sonnet sequence.

The volume begins with a helpful introduction by the editors, explaining the volume's tripartite organization (essays dedicated to the Sonnets and their past, the Sonnets and their moment, and the Sonnets in our moment). In the first essay, “Promising Eternity in the 1609 Quarto,” Cathy Shrank explores how Shakespeare in the Sonnets uses poetry as a form for challenging its commemorative properties. Lynne Magusson speculates about what happens if we imagine Shakespeare as the mysterious “Mr. W. H.,” the figure that Thorpe's enigmatic dedication addresses. Although somewhat unconvincing in its premise, the essay provides some fascinating material on Thorpe's career and its relevance to the volume. Kristine Johanson's essay situates Sonnet 59 amid poetical renderings of Ecclesiastes by Henry Lok. The essay offers a fascinating account of a sonnet that uses biblical language to reject commonplace biblical ideas. The comparison with Lok, moreover, highlights the deliberate secularity of Shakespeare's sequence. In the final essay in the first section, John Roe explores Shakespeare's debt to Petrarchan sonnets, focusing on the phenomena of unfulfilled imperatives, particularly as they are deployed in a suggestive account of the injured intimacies of Sonnet 120.

The second section begins with Colin Burrow's engrossing essay, “Shakespeare's Sonnets as Event.” Burrow analyzes the poems as individual aesthetic events that refuse to be tied to a single narrative, however much their order may tempt readers to read the poems as events in the story of a real relationship. Ann Thompson's essay, “A Lingering Farewell,” reads closely the valedictory gestures of Sonnet 87 against Shakespeare's dramatic writings. Focusing on recurrent legal and financial metaphors, and emphasizing the poem's predominantly feminine rhymes, Thompson shows how Shakespeare wrestles formally with the trauma of separation. In a particularly engaging contribution, J. K. Barret looks at a range of sonnets dealing with the theme of “injurious time.” Barret explores in detail the relationship between material ruin and emotional loss, and offers a fascinating account of the way that time is embedded in the very form of the sonnet. Shankar Raman reads the Sonnets amid the early modern emergence of modern mathematics. While the essay perhaps tells us more about early modern mathematics than about Shakespeare's poetry, it does propose ways that the Sonnets address numerically related issues of singularity and exemplarity.

The collection really comes alive in the third section, on the “Afterlives of the Sonnets.” Matthew Harrison analyzes the fascinating history of the near obsession with rearranging the collection to generate some kind of coherence. This striking essay reveals afresh the “vibrant relationality” that animates the collection (193). Jonathan Post explores the afterlives of the Sonnets in contemporary works by Alice Fulton, Don Paterson, and others. Attentive to early modern and contemporary poetics, Post provides a fascinating account of the processes by which contemporary poets have metabolized Shakespeare's Sonnets into their own deeply original works. Relatedly, Reiko Oya explores the influence of Shakespeare's collection on Ted Hughes, focusing on Hughes's frequently strained effort to remake Shakespeare in his own image.

The final essay of this section, and the collection, is a valuable piece by Daniel Moss that provides a creative yet pragmatic way to excite today's students about these poems. The collection concludes with an afterword from Heather Dubrow, which looks at the present state of play in the field and puts an apt punctuation mark on an important addition to the study of Shakespeare's Sonnets.