Criticism

Microreview: Mary Jo Bang, Elegy

 Sixty-four lyrics written in the year following the death of Bang's son.

  • Robert Schnall

Microreview: Lisa Samuels, The Invention of Culture

Poetry honeycombed with questions, doubts, promises.

  • Fred Muratori

Microreview: Rosmarie Waldrop, Curves to the Apple

One of the leading voices in contemporary American poetry. 

  • Andy Frazee

Microreview: Rusty Morrison, The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story

A book-length meditation on the death of Morrison's father.

  • Rebecca Porte

Microreview: Sabra Loomis, House Held Together by Winds

Poems told by a little girl who exposes her dominating relatives.

  • Celia Bland

The Party’s Over

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam attempt to provide a blueprint to save Republican politics from wholesale collapse.

  • Lew Daly

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The End of Sexual Identity

Fiction’s new terrain.

  • Stacey D’Erasmo

Poets and the People

Reflections on solidarity during wartime.

  • Robert von Hallberg

Out of Defeat

Aimé Césaire’s miraculous words.

  • Colin Dayan

The Crucified Hand

Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart.

  • Raymond McDaniel

Microreview: Peter Waldor, Door to a Noisy Room

Lyrical meditations on familial love, religious tales, and morality.

  • Nicholas Harp

Microreview: Janet McAdams, Feral

Poems that deal smartly with questions of what we lose by learning.

  • Sean Norton

Review: Tendril

By Bin Ramke.

  • Daniel Tiffany

Microreview: Stephen Burt, The Forms of Youth.

20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence.

  • Robert Archambeau

Microreview: Elizabeth Reddin, The Hot Garment of Love Is Insecure

Poems that trace the relationship between knowing and confessing. 

  • Stephanie Anderson

Demon Doubt

An interview with Vivian Gornick.

  • Vivian Gornick
  • Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

The Mirror

Imagining justice in Palestine.

  • Elias Khoury

We Laughed, We Cried

Flann O’Brien’s triumph.

  • Roger Boylan

Over the Last Limit

Resurrecting Vladimir Mayakovsky

  • Marjorie Perloff

Free verse

Counter-Revolution of the Word:The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960.

  • Charles Bernstein

Landmarks

Two collections by Kathleen Jamie.

  • Tess Taylor

Microreview: Rae Armantrout, Next Life

Poetics of dilemma.

  • Thomas Hummel

Microreview: Brenda Coultas, The Marvelous Bones of Time

Poems preoccupied with ephemeral, numinous features of human experience and the concrete objects that bear their residues.

  • Aaron McCollough

Microreview: Carson Cistulli, Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated

Cistulli embraces his status as the bastard child of pop culture and the poetic tradition.

  • Nicholas Bredie
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