Books
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.
Wave Books
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
When a Poet Becomes Invisible
Facing her mortality, Mary Ruefle does not ask for pity or sympathy, because death is democratic.
Books
Constructing the Language We Breathe
For half a century, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop have been (despite some serious competition) the most reliable conduit for poetry traveling from French and German into English.
Books
Put On Sunglasses and Write a Poem
Almost every line in Chelsey Minnis’s Baby, I Don’t Care could have been lifted from a hard-boiled detective flick or a tough-talking screwball comedy.
Books
Urban Poems of Yearning and Heartbreak
John Godfrey’s poems are like pointillistic patterns more than traditional narratives, suggesting an attitude over a story.
Books
Working at the Threshold of Prose
Renee Gladman investigates the moments when writing crosses over into another mode of expression.
Books
Drawings that Trace the Contours of Thought
Renee Gladman's drawings in Prose Architectures resemble not-quite-legible script, registering somewhere on the visual spectrum between image and language.
Books
Mary Ruefle’s Sage Advice on How to Keep Your Eyes Open While Sleeping
This is a book you want to read slowly, to savor both for what it says and how Ruefle says it.
Interview
A Collection of Poetry Interviews Is a Work of Poetry Itself
Modern poets talk about the Poetry Project, a vital forum in which political ideologies fueled exchanges and spurred literary movements.
Books
In Its Own Faint Language: On Don Mee Choi’s 'Hardly War'
Four million people (mostly civilian) were killed in the three years of the Korean War, and it is estimated that a million more Koreans were displaced in its aftermath, but here in the United States, the war is frequently referred to as “forgotten.”