Two Poems

my anonymous maker or makers were not
out to fashion amphorae, or ways to store oil, so much
as shaping vessels for the awkward soul.

Concord Grapes

What would it be like to belong 
entirely in your own body, or in your own country, or at 
your own address?

Reading Yeats in the Age of Trump

No poet captures the feeling of political failure—of having lost an unfair fight—like W. B. Yeats.

A Backward Song

Stephen Burt talks with Monica Youn about her book Blackacre, longlisted for the National Book Award

The Thing with Fathers

Poetry is offering new candor about the ways men care for their children.

John Clare’s Heirs

The Enduring Reach of a Rural Poet

Poems About Poems

Nearly Baroque

Nearly Baroque poets want art that puts excess, invention, and ornament first.

Three Stephanies

Color Theory

Butterfly with Parachute

Games About Frames

Minimalists Craig Dworkin and Michael O’Brien

Ways to the New

So many binaries circulate in and around contemporary poems.

Writing About Sex

The Shocking and Thrilling D. A. Powell

In the Details

Looking Closely with Allan Peterson

Our Poems, Ourselves

Does autobiography make good poetry?

Smothered to Smithereens

The poetics of motherhood

The New Thing

The object lessons of recent American poetry.

The Speed of Life

Lilies Without by Laura Kasischke.

An Unillusioned Life

The Collected Poems of Donald Justice.

Their Kind of Town

New collections from young American poets.

New Poets on the Block

A roundup of first and second books.

Where Every Eye’s a Guard

Rae Armantrout's poetry of suspicion.

Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park, 24

Get our newsletter

Vital reading on politics, ideas, and culture to your inbox


A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975

Registered 501(c)(3) organization