The poet suggests his art’s highest calling isn’t truth-telling but stirring our empathic imagination.
Poetry
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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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Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Wartime Poems
Ungaretti should be numbered among the ranks of such Great War poets as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg.
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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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The City as Seen From a Hi-Rise Window
Ed Roberson’s poems express a troubled awareness of the earth’s exhaustion.
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The Rise of the Machines
Rebecca Morgan Frank’s poems critique sexism, objectification, and violence by depicting humans as robots.
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Fernando Pessoa and His Fictional Coterie of Poets
The Portuguese author concealed his identity behind aliases, or what he called heteronyms, who served as guides to living.
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How Amanda Gorman’s Poetry Roused a “Country That Is Bruised but Whole”
Gorman, the youngest poet to ever perform at a US presidential inauguration, moved audiences across the nation with her perspective on a country “striving to forge a union with purpose.”
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Did You Know That Robert Hershon Is a Major Poet?
I cannot think of another contemporary poet who is willing to expose his vulnerability, worry, and pettiness through the lens of humor.
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Missives From the War to End All Wars
Elizabeth Gray’s poems seek to discover where we are in the midst of a battle we can never fully see.
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This Be the Verse: Our Favorite Poetry Books of 2020
John Yau and Albert Mobilio select a few choice titles from the past year.
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This Anthology of Trans Poetics Channels a Spirit of Dissent
We Want It All positions poetry as an everyday weapon, formidable against the cruel mundane.