"This hauntingly beautiful study recovers the boundlessness of Presocratic thought. In close readings of five early Greek cosmologists--Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus--Victoria Wohl invites us to suspend our preconceptions about poetry and philosophy in order to unfold the poetics of their worldmaking projects. She makes a powerful case for tarrying with the language of these thinkers not as a vehicle for transcendence but as a mode of thinking in the thick of things."--Brooke A. Holmes, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics, Princeton University "At last, a comprehensive study of the Presocratics for the twenty-first century. Abstract painters in a concrete medium who explored the world through the cracks between Being and language, the Presocratic philosophers have long been at once inviting and forbidding windows onto early Greek thought. Thanks to this book, their radically conceived projects are all the more irresistible and necessary today."--James Porter, Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Irving Stone Chair in Literature, University of California, Berkeley