Books
Poetry at the Intersection of Art and Twitter
The poems in Ken Babstock’s Swivelmount convey a sense that the whole truth of reality is tantalizingly just beyond one’s grasp.
Mark Scroggins
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Douglas Kearney's Poetry of Performance
Kearney’s language — exquisitely torqued and modulated, sheering from the formal to the vernacular — reminds us that we are in the hands of a masterful performer.
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A Poet of Isolation and Uncertainty
The poems in Jean Day’s Late Human carry a sense of having arrived at a moment when nothing feels quite right.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Only Poetry Can Interrogate Sex
Language caresses the tongue.
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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.
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Marcella Durand's Apocalyptic Pastoral
Durand’s urban environment in The Prospect is a source not of solace but of anxiety.
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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.
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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.
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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.