Criticism

Everyone’s Problem

Imaginging, and depicting, sexual trauma in verse.

  • Jessica Bozek

Poetry in Ziploc Bags: How to Embrace the Academy

“I am less inclined to imagine a future for my students in which poetry has been restored to its rightful freedom as pure pleasure.”

  • DeSales Harrison

An Honest Woman

Isabel Coixet's Learning to Drive

  • Alan A. Stone

Little Gods

Fanny Howe's Second Childhood

  • Heather Treseler

The Unseen World

Stacy Szymaszek’s hart island.

  • Dale Smith

The Gore Vidal Museum

The author's bid against being forgotten.

  • Daniel Luzer

Sign up for our newsletter

Poetic Geometries

Moby-Dick as Primer to Creative Crisis

  • Dan Beachy-Quick

The Passion of Ellen Willis

On the feminist essayist, journalist, and music critic who championed women’s liberation.

  • Judith Levine

The Ongoing Menace

Toby Martinez de las Rivas is the first poet to rise to Geoffrey Hill’s manifold challenges.

  • Dai George

How Should a Friendship Be?

On the reissue of Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk.

  • Maggie Doherty

The Ironies of Embodiment

Frank Bidart in Poetry magazine.

  • Christopher J. Adamson

Park that Lark

Michael Almereyda's Cymbeline

  • Alan A. Stone

Keepers of History

Mary Jo Bang's The Last Two Seconds.

  • Elizabeth Metzger

Root Work

Nathaniel Mackey's Blue Fasa

  • Michael Leong

A Science of Literature

It has been said that computation will mark the end of humanistic inquiry. Actual literary research in this vein suggests otherwise.

  • Ben Merriman

Archipelagos of Experience

Translating Southeaster by Haroldo Conti.

  • Jessica Sequeira

The Problem with David Brooks

In true American style, Brooks understands our lives to be the products of individual will alone.

  • Claude S. Fischer

Work This Thing

Two new books by Fred Moten

  • Elizabeth Willis

Your Own Worst Enemy

Every day we transgress against our own longing to act well.

  • Vivian Gornick

Everyday Apocalypse

Ansel Elkins's Blue Yodel

  • Olivia Schwob

The Carbon Cycle

Kathleen Ossip's The Do-Over

  • Martha Silano

Can She Act?

Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria

  • Alan A. Stone

Preserving the Self

The Political Economy of Attention

  • George Scialabba

“The Pants of Time”

Reading the poems of Duncan McNaughton.

  • Benjamin Hollander
trending_flat
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

Help Us Stay Paywall-Free

Donate

Become a Member

Subscribe