This special issue examines the nature and future of the poetry collection in the transition from the printed book to digital media. Since poetry and its generic features from the Renaissance onwards have been shaped by the material and commercial constraints of the book-as-object, how can we gauge today the impact of social networks, blogs and digital archives on the composition, circulation, and reception of poetry? Has poetry as a field expanded or contracted since the advent of the Web? Far from being strictly contemporary issues, questions as to how a poetic corpus is constituted (and fears about its possible dispersion) largely precede the birth of the Internet and cannot therefore be attributed to this paradigm shift. Writing against alarmist discourses about the death of the book or the exhaustion of poetry, the articles gathered here suggest that the poetry book more than ever functions as an aesthetic and political laboratory within which poets, publishers, and critics can invest the instability of the collection as a network that is constantly shaped and reshaped. To examine the different modalities of poetry outside the book is thus to ask to what extent the multimodal and composite poem – in turn an installation, a performance and a playlist – reinvents itself as an ephemeral, radical, polysensory assemblage on the contemporary scene. Covering a wide range of methods, periods, and places, these essays eventually demonstrate that poetry books in the digital age are not so much disappearing as they are mutating; in fact, they continue to reinvent themselves under the pressures of history and technological evolution, a testament to their exceptional vitality.