Louis Bury is an art critic, writer, and professor whose work connects constraint-based writing, Oulipo, poetry, criticism, visual art, ecology, and experimental form. He is Professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY, and has written widely about contemporary art and literature.
His books are Exercises in Criticism: The Theory and Practice of Literary Constraint and The Way Things Go. Both books use formal procedures as part of their thinking: criticism, autobiography, poetry, art writing, and constraint become interdependent modes of composition.
Louis Bury in Shampoo
Shampoo Issue 37 published Bury’s Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups: An Exegesis. The piece uses the cut-up procedure while discussing Bellamy’s own transformation of cut-up practice, allowing the critical method to enact the literary technique under examination.
This appearance places Bury within Shampoo’s archive of contemporary poets and within a broader field of experimental poetry where criticism, appropriation, constraint, collage, and performance can become literary forms.
Constraint and criticism
Exercises in Criticism applies procedural methods to literary criticism. Its chapters use formal restrictions and compositional devices to investigate Oulipo and the wider legacy of constraint-based writing in English.
The Shampoo essay belongs to the same intellectual territory. Bury’s cut-up exegesis treats criticism as an activity capable of formal experiment, so the argument develops through arrangement, collision, quotation, and recombination.
The Way Things Go
Bury’s 2023 book The Way Things Go combines poetry, art writing, and life writing around anticipatory grief, ecological crisis, family history, illness, and the passage of time. The book is structured as a book-length Oulipian “melting snowball”: its opening chapter contains seventy-one sentences, and every successive chapter decreases by one sentence until the final chapter reaches one.
The diminishing structure makes form part of the book’s meditation on loss. Personal history and global instability unfold inside a pattern that is visibly running down, while the act of writing continues to generate connection and recurrence.
Art writing and ecology
Bury’s criticism appears in publications including Frieze, Hyperallergic, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtReview, and Art in America. His recent art writing frequently addresses climate change, ecology, and artist-run spaces.
This movement among poetry, criticism, memoir, and art writing gives Bury a distinctive place within contemporary American poetry and experimental prose, where the boundaries between literary genres can themselves become material for composition.
Further reading
Louis Bury’s official site provides his current biography and bibliography. His page for The Way Things Go describes the book’s formal design, while punctum books documents the 2023 edition.