177 in education 20(2) Autumn 2014 A Review of Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences

and Pauline Sameshima (2009), surveys the landscape of poetic inquiry as a research method in qualitative social science research. Drawing from some of the foremost scholars in the field, this collection plunges into and probes poetic inquiry as both a medium for representing data and for attending to lived experiences. As qualitative researchers continue to grapple with the complexities of representation, poetic inquiry advances an increasingly holistic way of knowing and being in the world, one that does not exclusively privilege cerebral understanding, allowing for the visceral stirrings that comprise human phenomena. Poetic Inquiry makes a significant contribution to the field of arts-based research. As articulated by the authors of this anthology, poetic inquiry serves as a way to emote, evoke, and provoke experience. It works with rather than against the complexities of experience, which researchers are always mining for understanding that is not easily extrapolated. As such, poetic inquiry is a way of dwelling in nuance and intricacy. The powerful entwining of prose and poetry in this collection is highly accessible to a diverse audience and a pleasure to read. Poetic Inquiry is comprised of three sections: Vox Theoria, Vox Autobiographia/Autoethnographia, and Vox Participare. The opening foreword by Ivan Brady and introduction by Prendergast prepare readers for the collection to follow by addressing how poetic processes operate in social science research and by attending to the central question: What is poetic inquiry? The concert of voices enfolded in these pages demonstrates that through the membrane of poetry one can cease to simply read about experience, but might, as Sullivan describes, have an experience. Insights into the use of poetic inquiry as a way to collect and analyze data and represent findings are accentuated with the infusion of poignant verses. They can at once bruise the heart and make the spirit spark and tingle. Mirroring the expression of the methodology under study, Poetic Inquiry is an invitation to enter into “relationality and the ever-opening question of how to live well in the world ” (Prendergast, p. xxx)