Criticism

Microreview: G. C. Waldrep and John Gallaher, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts

Two poets collaborate on a shared present. 

Microreview: Rob Schlegel, The Lesser Fields

Transition and transience govern the obsessions in this first collection.

Microreview: Christian Hawkey, Ventrakl

A ghost story—not in the flashlight-under-the-face, seated-around-the-campfire sense, but rather in the hauntological, Derridean one.

Microreview: Michele Glazer, On Tact, & the Made Up World

Poems that approach death with lyricism.

Bin Laden: The Movie

The director of The Hurt Locker takes on the 9/11 mastermind

Like a Dog

Serge Avedikian’s Barking Island.

Out of Reach

Susan Howe’s, That This.

(Most) Everyone’s Invited

Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets, 

Microreview: CAConrad, The Book of Frank

Birth, childhood, independence, sexual awaking, marriage, parenting, and death. 

Microreview: Wisława Szymborska, Here

Poems that are haunted by visitations: the figure of memory, the personification of an idea, the poet as a teenager.

Microreview: Allison Titus, The Sum of Every Lost Ship

“Stationed fast to parentheses of sleep and winter,” Allison Titus’s debut collection, The Sum of Every Lost Ship, probes the emotion of the (nearly) motionless.

Microreview: L. S. Klatt, Cloud of Ink

 A bird or beast appears in almost every poem in this collection.

Microreview: Grace Zabriskie, Poems

An authentic and spirited book from a longtime character actor.

The Novel Is Not Dead

Despite critics’ best attempts to kill it.

Hello, Columbus

Even the Rain (También la lluvia) Directed by Icíar Bollaín

Prose, Thinly Disguised as an IKEA Superstore

The poetic shows up in more places than we think.

Heroisms

Floating World

If a travelogue were to arrive as writing, it might read like Maureen N. McLane’s two full-length collections of poems, Same Life and World Enough.

Hello Kitty

“Gurlesque poets,” Glenum writes, “put the unabashed quest for female pleasure at the center of their poetics.”

Synecdoche

Kathleen Graber’s, The Eternal City, 

Microreview: Edip Cansever, Dirty August

The first English-language translation of the Turkish poet.

Microreview: Christian Wiman, Every Riven Thing

Poems where God is a constant presence. 

Microreview: Samuel Amadon, Like a Sea

Poems that present a world refracted through distracted consciousness.

Microreview: David Morley, Enchantment

The interests of a naturalist combined with Romani heritage.

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