The poems in Jean Day’s Late Human carry a sense of having arrived at a moment when nothing feels quite right.
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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Poetry as a Blowtorch of Protest
While despondency and madness appear aplenty in Sean Bonney’s writing, its keynote is pure, hard rage.