In A Broken Thing, contemporary poets, including Kazim Ali, Kathy Fagan, Alice Fulton, Kimiko Hahn, Ben Lerner, Carl Phillips, and Paisley Rekdal, offer short essays and reflections on the nature of the poetic line. The seventy essays included offer a practical discussion on how to use lineation to achieve certain effects, and present—as Vander Zee notes in his introduction—a range of perspectives on how “the line has become an aesthetic, sociopolitical, and, at times, metaphysical variable even as it remains deeply invested in the formal minutiae of rhythm and metrics.”