Criticism

Microreviews: Brandon Shimoda, O Bon

Brandon Shimoda’s O Bon charts the arc of abjection after the death of a grandfather.

  • Kristina Marie Darling

Microreviews: Jeffrey Skinner, The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets

Jeffrey Skinner, author of five books of poems, has penned a hilarious yet moving “self-help memoir.”

  • Kelly Fordon

Microreviews: Elizabeth Willis, Address

Poems unafraid to salute our democratic ideals. 

  • Noah Eli Gordon

Microreviews: Harmony Holiday, Negro League Baseball

A personal and cultural history fit together first as hearing and then as seeing.

  • W. M. Lobko

The Practice of Everyday Life

Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas

  • Christopher Schmidt

Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric

Today’s poetry establishment commands polite respect but hardly enthusiasm and excitement.

  • Marjorie Perloff
with responses from
  • Annie Finch
  • Cathy Park Hong
  • Dan Beachy-Quick
  • Katie Degentesh
  • Robert Archambeau
  • Lytton Smith
  • Noah Eli Gordon
  • Evie Shockley
  • Rebecca Wolff
  • Ange Mlinko
  • Dorothea Lasky
  • Anthony Madrid
  • Sandra Lim
  • Samuel Amadon
  • Matthew Zapruder
  • DeSales Harrison
  • Stephanie Burt
  • Maureen N. McLane

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Writing About Sex

The Shocking and Thrilling D. A. Powell

  • Stephanie Burt

Never So Free

Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation portrays an Iranian divorce under sharia law with sensitivity and pathos.

  • Alan A. Stone

Microreview: Elizabeth Willis, Address

Willis has the finest ear for the lyric amongst her generation.

  • Richard Deming

Poetry and the Public Sphere

Addressing “When That Becomes This”

  • David Micah Greenberg

Back in Time

Julian Barnes asks: How much of what we think makes us special is only a trick of memory?

  • Roger Boylan

Natural Experiments

Embracing Poetry’s Failure

  • Christopher Schmidt

When Critics Mattered

On Pauline Kael, Robert Ebert, and seventies film.

  • Jonathan Kirshner

Core Samples from the World

Forrest Gander’s latest book injects ethical consequence into his daring sense of the permeability of structure and the instability of form.

  • Richard Deming

Fall Higher

After more than a dozen books, Dean Young has become the spokesperson for a certain kind of poetic abandon.

  • Andrew Allport

Helsinki

Poems with pleasing uncertainty.

  • Elizabeth Gramm

Either Way I’m Celebrating

Between poetry and stand-up comedy.

  • Kathleen Rooney

Picture World

Niels Frank's latest collection is more like an inspired monologue than poems. 

  • Nate Pritts

Odd One Out

An Interview with Joan Houlihan

  • Joan Houlihan
  • Sawnie Morris

An Acquired Taste

Swinton gives her all to the martyred victim in We Need to Talk about Kevin.

  • Alan A. Stone

The Suffering World

Poets Grieve

  • Katie Peterson

All Together Now

How Description Fosters Connection

  • Siobhan Phillips

Poet’s Sampler: Corina Copp

Reading Corina Copp’s work, one gets the sense that she is part of a long lineage of poets whose language is less a means to express what can be said than what should be said, or what has long been waiting to be said.

  • Corina Copp
  • Dorothea Lasky

Mock Star

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

  • Alan A. Stone
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