Criticism

Unpacking

It’s strange to think of Katchor’s work as lifelike, but there it is. Its lifelikeness is partly a function of the felt possibility of ongoing randomness inherent in the comic-strip mode.

  • John Crowley

Cold Gem

Fuller enters a babblingly confident corporate world where he concedes that something frightful is on the way.

  • Calvin Bedient

Each Passing Thought

Rae Armantrout's Money Shot.

  • William Montgomery

Microreview: Laura Solomon, The Hermit

“I dreamt of a poem in which I mastered all my feelings.”

  • Nate Pritts

Microreview: Lisa Fishman, Flower Cart

Poems driven by the spirit of thing-finding.

  • Leah Falk

Microreview: Eugenijus Ališanka, from unwritten histories

Giving voice to identity and experience.

  • Kristie Kachler

Sign up for our newsletter

Microreview: Albert Mobilio, Touch Wood

Bare poetic essentials that at the same time function as gleaming ornaments.

  • Alan Gilbert

Microreview: Shira Dentz, black seeds on a white dish

Poems that challenge the reader to some speedy catch-me-if-you-can linguistic play.

  • Celia Bland

Where Love Grows

Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot is about becoming an adult, about moving, marrying, and making mistakes.

  • Leland de la Durantaye

The Escape Artist

Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations

  • Robert Huddleston

Imagining Faith

If Greenaway correctly diagnosed the aesthetic crisis of modern film, The Tree of Life is the remedy.

  • Alan A. Stone

Priest, Gangster, Drinker, Gent

Reading Flann in the birthplace of psychoanalysis. 

  • Roger Boylan

My Hungry Soul

Alfred Kazin’s raw materials.

  • Vivian Gornick

Gone Missing

Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s Metropole

  • David Gorin

In from the Cold

Miłosz and Brodsky’s productive exile.

  • Alissa Valles

Microreview: Shane McCrae, Mule

Poems about being “half.”

  • Amelia Klein

Microreview: Anja Utler, Engulf—Enkindle

An exciting young German-language poet of rare linguistic and imaginative inventiveness and power.

  • Paul Franz

Microreview: Ewa Chrusciel, Strata

Remarkable prose poems from Poland.

  • Tony Brinkley

Microreview: Heather Christle, The Difficult Farm

A powerful voice in younger American poetry has arrived.

  • Robert Schnall

Microreview: Joanna Klink, Raptus

Joanna Klink’s third collection, Raptus, masterfully navigates the treacherous zone between the lyric and the all-too poetical.

  • Amy Newlove Schroeder

Seriously Funny

On Howard Jacobson, the Jewish Jane Austen.

  • Roger Boylan

In the Details

Looking Closely with Allan Peterson

  • Stephanie Burt

When That Becomes This

Comparison in politics and poetry.

  • David Micah Greenberg

Microreview: Ian Pindar, Emporium

A darkly genial debut collection.

  • Paul Franz
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