A bit of user-generated content warmed our hearts over the weekend when we had a chance to view the following YouTube review of our recent volume Herman Melville: Complete Poems.

A Heap of Broken Images (the title is a clue to its creator’s interests) is the nom de web of Matthias Crane, a graduate student in nineteenth-century American literature who is currently riding out the pandemic in South Carolina. Matthias started his YouTube channel earlier this month because, as he related in an email, “with the pandemic cutting off any sort of in-person discussions about books, I found I needed a format to just get my thoughts out there.”

Asked to expand on his enthusiasm for our collection of Melville’s poetry, Matthias added: “I was just excited that there is a one-volume collection of Melville’s poems, and wanted to let the world know that it exists! I’ve been waiting for a volume like it for years.”

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. We’ll add that for literature lovers who enjoy the “Sort of” Melville review, Matthias’s other videos are worth investigating, in particular this one about William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience—not least because it includes a more extensive guest appearance by his cat, Heathcliff (who remains rather frustratingly out of camera range in the Melville video).