The poems in Jean Day’s Late Human carry a sense of having arrived at a moment when nothing feels quite right.
Author Archives: Mark Scroggins
Mark Scroggins is a poet, biographer, and critic. His recent books include the poetry collection Pressure Dressing, the essay collection The Mathematical Sublime: Writing About Poetry, and a selection of the erotic poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey, and Manhattan.
Posted inBooks
Poetry as the “Art of Thinking It Through”
The linguistic imagination of William Fuller’s new collection, Daybreak, takes the form of sustained odysseys between philosophical abstraction and the everyday concrete.
Posted inBooks
Don Mee Choi’s Language of History
Just as collage artists might paste a scrap of newsprint or a piece of rattan chair-bottom to their canvas, documentary poets form their poetic work from public records, firsthand accounts, and newspaper reports.
Posted inBooks
Poems in the Language of Death
Paul Celan’s truest homeland, paradoxically, was the German language — the language of the Nazis who imprisoned him in a forced labor camp and murdered his parents.
Posted inBooks
A New, Feminist Translation of Beowulf
Maria Dahvana Headley’s breathtakingly audacious and idiomatically rich Beowulf: A New Translation is a breath of iconoclastically fresh air blowing through the old tale’s stuffy mead-hall atmosphere.
Posted inBooks
Marcella Durand’s Apocalyptic Pastoral
Durand’s urban environment in The Prospect is a source not of solace but of anxiety.
Posted inBooks
The Monumental and Human Poetry of Paul Valéry
The beauty and power of Valéry’s best writing is undeniable, and the human dilemmas his work addresses remain with us.
Posted inBooks
Poetry With a Painterly Eye
The latest poetry collections by Lawrence Giffin and Lesle Lewis use the vocabulary of visual arts to extend poetry’s reach.
Posted inBooks
Susan Howe’s Feminist Poetics
Throughout her work and in her latest volume, Concordance, Howe confronts the plight of the female writer in a masculine literary culture.
Posted inBooks
Two Poets Search for Home
In their latest volumes, poets Youmna Chlala and Chris Nealon confront the notion of home and the emotional challenges of our own tentative, pre- or post-apocalyptic moment.
Posted inBooks
Poetry as a Blowtorch of Protest
While despondency and madness appear aplenty in Sean Bonney’s writing, its keynote is pure, hard rage.