Within sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, poetics has never been a marginal concern, even if it has not always occupied the center of analytic attention. From Jakobson’s account of the poetic function to Hymes’s ethnopoetics, scholars have repeatedly shown that patterned form is not ornamental residue but constitutive of social life (Jakobson Reference Jakobson and Sebeok1960; Hymes Reference Hymes1981). Poetics of living: Aspects of multimodal and multisensorial semiosis enters this tradition self-consciously. Published in Bloomsbury’s ‘Studies in Linguistic Anthropology’ series, the volume proposes to widen the analytic object of poetics from verbal text to the coordinated semiotic organization of language, body, materiality, and sensory experience. Its central premise is that poetics should be understood not as a special property of literary discourse alone, but as a broader mode of patterned semiosis.

The introduction provides the conceptual architecture for this argument and is among the book’s most useful contributions. Rather than merely previewing the chapters, it situates the volume within a broad history of discursive poetics and clarifies how the book’s key terms and approaches fit within that tradition. The editors distinguish five major trajectories in post-Jakobsonian poetics—ethnopoetics, conversational or interactional poetics, metapragmatic or semiotic poetics, embodied or multimodal poetics, and multisensorial or material poetics—and position the chapters at their intersection. This framing clarifies the intellectual background of the volume and gives the collection a coherence that edited books do not always achieve.

Part 1, ‘Ethnopoetic reformation’, reworks ethnopoetics across a range of empirical settings. In chapter 1, Makiko Takekuro examines ceremonial speech at a harvest festival on Ishigaki Island and argues that its discourse organization reflects an even-numbered poetic kata, in contrast to the odd-numbered preferences more commonly associated with mainland Japanese discourse. Takekuro argues that patterned discourse may persist across language shift: even when speakers use standard Japanese, local poetic organization remains available as a socially sedimented resource. The analysis of gesture, audience participation, and environmental alignment is effective in showing that the event is not reducible to spoken language alone.

Gaku Kajimaru’s chapter 2 extends ethnopoetics in a different direction by treating melody not as accompaniment but as part of the communicative infrastructure of reciprocal singing. Comparing Han’ge, Buyi’ge, and Japanese kakeuta, he argues that ethnopoetic analysis must account for tune, melodic contour, and formulaic phrase-melody relations rather than treating melody as secondary to verbal text. Its main contribution lies in showing that intelligibility in sung genres depends not simply on shared language but on familiarity with melodic mold. Kajimaru also links poetics to language maintenance by showing how reduced intergenerational exposure undermines the capacity to hear, understand, and continue these forms.

Kuniyoshi Kataoka’s chapter 3, on a rock-climbing narrative of ‘an immense fall’, is one of the collection’s most methodologically developed chapters. Combining ethnopoetics, chronotopic analysis, gesture analysis, and material anchoring, the chapter shows how a narrative of bodily risk is organized through shifts in transitivity, animacy, repetition, embodied enactment, and the handling of climbing gear. The analysis is most persuasive in the way it renders chronotope analytically tractable. Rather than remaining a broad literary notion, chronotope is linked here to grammar, gesture, and spatial orientation in ways that show how narrative stance and expertise are socially produced. The discussion of low-transitivity clauses and inanimate subjects in the fall sequence is especially persuasive, showing how grammar itself participates in the representation of helplessness and danger.

Part 2, ‘Poetic inequalities and beyond’, turns more directly toward ideology, social positioning, and institutional discourse. Hiroko Takanashi’s chapter 4 examines wine-tour talk in New Zealand and shows how a guide constructs wine as a multisensory tourism resource through parallelism, resonance, gesture, deixis, and the material presence of the bottle. The chapter makes a useful contribution to the study of tourism discourse by showing that a commercial and apparently casual encounter may nonetheless be densely structured by patterned semiotic organization. The guide’s talk does not merely describe the wine; it organizes how the wine is to be perceived and evaluated.

Chapter 5 makes the most explicit attempt in the volume to place discourse-centered linguistic anthropology in dialogue with evolutionary theory. Drawing on Enfield’s enchronic frame, the chapter analyzes cross-turn parallelism in talk among American expatriates in Japan and in a public discussion of stereotypes about Asian women. Masataka Yamaguchi argues that poetic structuring may have proximate functions in bonding, alignment, and social coordination, and seeks to connect interactional detail to broader questions of cultural evolution. The chapter is strongest where it shows that repetition across speakers is integral to social coordination rather than merely stylistic. Chapter 6 turns to choral repetition in a Japanese junior high school English classroom, examining it through Peircean categories, chronotopic organization, and poetics. Takeshi Enomoto argues that ritualized repetition precipitates regimented qualia that become indexical icons of standardized language and modern educational subjectivity. The chapter’s main contribution lies in showing that repetitive classroom practice produces socially organized forms of feeling linked to broader chronotopic imaginaries of schooling and personhood. The discussion is especially useful where it moves beyond propositional meaning toward the sensorial texture of institutional socialization.

Toshiaki Furukawa’s chapter 7 turns to a 1970s Hawaiian-language radio telling of the ʻAkaka Falls legend. Combining ethnographic conversation analysis with historical media material in a lesser-studied language, the chapter shows how collaborative storytelling, genealogy, and epistemic asymmetry are organized interactionally and tied to authenticity and the transmission of Indigenous knowledge. Its main contribution lies in showing that narrative poetics in media settings cannot be separated from local systems of authority and entitlement. Risako Ide’s chapter 8, on a plea during a 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstration, offers one of the clearest accounts in the volume of the relation between poetic organization and political speech. Through close analysis of repetition, resonance, induced-fit utterances, and chronotopic framing, Ide shows how poetic organization intensifies the pragmatic force of political speech. Read together, these chapters show that poetic organization is not peripheral to institutional, political, or pedagogical discourse, but one of the means through which authority, alignment, and affect are socially constituted.

Part 3, ‘Recapturing poetics’, shifts the emphasis from empirical analysis to broader theoretical reflection. William O. Beeman’s chapter 9 proposes a ‘poetic imperative’, understood as a general human drive toward heightened, figure-grounded expression across performance and sensorial domains. The editors’ concluding chapter returns to the collection’s key conceptual distinction between multi-, cross-, and plurimodality, culminating in the notion of ‘the plurimodal whole’. It gathers the collection’s arguments and insists that communicative practice must be approached as an integrated but non-reductive organization of modalities and senses.

The volume’s most important contribution is its refusal to separate aesthetics from social organization. In this respect it inherits a line of argument from earlier work on poetics, but it pushes further by insisting that bodily movement, sensory calibration, and surrounding objects are not merely contextual supplements to language. They are constitutive of poetic formation. This is a useful corrective to versions of discourse analysis that remain too logocentric. More broadly, the book reasserts that poetics is not a niche concern but a way of understanding how social actors render action perceivable, memorable, affectively charged, and normatively consequential. It also offers a broad conceptual map linking ethnopoetics, metapragmatics, multimodality, and the study of sensory semiosis, while demonstrating across a set of carefully chosen case studies that patterned semiosis is indispensable to the analysis of ritual, pedagogy, tourism, protest, narrative, and identity. Taken together, these contributions make the volume less a collection of discrete case studies than a sustained argument for treating poetics as a foundational dimension of social semiosis.

At the same time, some of the volume’s larger conceptual claims remain more programmatic than fully worked through. The distinctions among plurimodal, multimodal, crossmodal, and multisensorial are suggestive, though they do not always produce clearer empirical differentiation across the chapters. Likewise, while the collection raises important questions about power and inequality, that line of analysis is developed unevenly. And despite its broad account of multisensorial semiosis, the volume remains focused primarily on spoken interaction, leaving other modalities comparatively underexplored. These reservations are less weaknesses than indications of how much terrain the book opens for further research.

Even so, Poetics of living makes a substantial case for restoring poetics to the center of discourse-centered inquiry, now with greater sensitivity to embodiment, sensation, and material environment. Its achievement lies less in offering a fully consolidated framework than in reopening a foundational question for language-and-society research: how patterned forms, across modalities, organize social life. That is a significant achievement, and one that should stimulate further work across sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and semiotics.