Criticism

Exploring the Hidden China

Yu Hua's Boy in the Twilight.

  • Drew Calvert

Sieves of Consciousness

On Mary Ruefle's Trances of the Blast

  • BK Fischer

BBP13

Ahren Warner strikes a seductive compact between the older and younger camps of British poetry.

  • Dai George

Forgetting the Holocaust

The Book Thief is a Holocaust story far removed from the one told by survivors.

  • Alan A. Stone

Paradise of Absence

Alan Shapiro's Night of the Republic

  • Jeremy Bass

Poems Seeking Readers

Flemish by Caroline Knox, and Meme by Susan Wheeler.

  • Jo Ann Clark

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Microreview: Rachel Richardson, Copperhead

Leaning into silence.

  • Tess Taylor

The Verbal Equivalent of a Homemade Bomb

On Andrew Elliott's Mortality Rate.

  • Beverley Bie Brahic

Awkward, Diligent: Liu Xiaobo’s Love Poetry

The creative output of the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

  • Nick Admussen

Microreview: Sharmila Cohen and Paul Legault, The Sonnets

Adaptations that preserve Shakespeare’s wit and carpe diem vulgarity.

  • Rebecca Liu

Made to Burn: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers

A nominee for the National Book Award.

  • Marta Figlerowicz

Microreview: Jennifer Militello, Body Thesaurus

A collection that moves past the body versus mind duality.

  • Gabrielle Flam

The Marriage of Granite and Rainbow: A Biography of Robert Duncan

Lisa Jarnot offers a glimpse into the academic and artistic communities of Robert Duncan.

  • Brian Teare

Microreview: Emily Fragos, Hostage

Poems that remain in the mind. 

  • Tara Neelakantappa Safronoff

A Conversation with Stephen Burt

The ethics of the imagination: after crossing the threshold into a fantasy world, can we safely dispense with social norms?

  • Monica Youn

Microreview: Bin Ramke, Aerial

Stunning, strange, and original verse. 

  • Noah Eli Gordon

Haven in a Heartless World

Alan Stone reviews Enough Said

  • Alan A. Stone

Microview: Lisa Russ Spaar, Vanitas, Rough

Poems that refuse to leave the body. 

  • Andy Nicole Bowers

Do the Right Thing

On Italo Calvino’s letters, 1941–1985.

  • Leland de la Durantaye

Microreview: Betsy Wheeler, Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room

Non-sonnets and other love poems.

  • Lynn Melnick

Awakening

Muriel Rukeyser’s recently uncovered novel tells the story of a young woman coming of age—politically, sexually, intellectually—in a country at war.

  • Cecily Parks

The Discipline of Vicinity

Far from a paean to the far-off and the frontier, Walden testifies to what is most next and near.

  • Christina Davis

Lost and (Almost) Found

Dara Wier's You Good Thing

  • Michael D. Snediker

Hardscrabble

The novel House of Earth shows Woody Guthrie in a different light, exiled from the Dust Bowl but dreaming of it still.

  • Megan Pugh
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