Tender Buttons (Annotated)

Published in 1914, *Tender Buttons* is Gertrude Stein's radical triptych of prose poems—"Objects," "Food," and "Rooms"—in which ordinary things are liberated from descriptive and grammatical expectation. Rather than presenting a stable narrative or recognizable symbolism, Stein uses repetition, syntactic dislocation, sound patterning, and startling verbal juxtapositions to make language itself the...