Poetry

Browse our essays and reviews on poetry.

The New Wave of Sad Pizzazz: Three British Poets

Twentieth-century British poetry had many virtues, but it was not overburdened with a sense of style.

  • Dai George

Prairies of Air

Brian Teare's Companion Grasses.

  • Christopher J. Adamson

Microreview: Hillary Gravendyk, Harm

Poetry and physical pain.

  • Julie Kantor

“Discovery” Poetry Contest Winners

  • Meghan Maguire Dahn
  • Jeremy Schmidt
  • Justin Boening
  • Nava EtShalom

“Here where she shouldn’t be”: On Conceptual Reading

Poetry has less to do with rules and concepts than it does with transgression.

  • Lindsay Turner

Medieval Troubadours

While the troubadours are known for their romantic attitudes, some poems reveal disturbing aggression towards women.

  • Sandra Simonds

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Microreview: Calvin Bedient, The Multiple

One of the most exciting and volatile poets of our time.

  • Daniel Tiffany

National Poetry Month 2014

It's simple: every day in April, we're publishing a poem.

  • Boston Review

Seven Questions on Milk and Filth

  • Lynn Melnick
  • Carmen Giménez Smith

They Came to Bury Him

Friends, Bitches, Countrymen: Contemporary Feminist Poetics

  • Diana Arterian

Microreview: Emily Pettit, Goat in the Snow

A radiant debut.

  • Sasha Fletcher

Nearly Baroque

Nearly Baroque poets want art that puts excess, invention, and ornament first.

  • Stephanie Burt

Country on Fire

  • Jennifer Willoughby

Microreview: Lucy Ives, Orange Roses

A poetic coming-of-age narrative.

  • Katy Lederer

Frank Lima, 1939–2013

Is there any more hopeful and heartening life story in American poetry than that of Frank Lima?

  • Nico Alvarado

A World in Flames

Brenda Hillman's Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire

  • Dana Levin

Microreview: Sarah Vap, End of the Sentimental Journey

A mystery poem.

  • Clare Emily Clifford

Microreview: Eleni Sikelianos, The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead

Collage poetics, scientific idiom, and exploration of the poem as essay.

  • Carol Moldaw

A Note on Rae Armantrout

Who is this poet channeling?

  • Ilya Kaminsky

Microreview: Lyn Hejinian, My Life and My Life in the Nineties

Experiencing a classic anew.

  • Tim Wood

Poet’s Sampler: John Duvernoy

  • Timothy Liu
  • John Duvernoy

Ghost Poet

An interview with the Korean poet Kim Kyung Ju.

  • Jake Levine
  • Kim Kyung Ju

Poems on Surveillance

We invited poets to contribute new works, entering into a larger dialogue on what it means to have open eyes and ears in the twenty-first century. Poems by Armantrout, Ashbery, Bernstein, Pinsky, and others.

  • Andrew Ridker
with responses from
  • Cathy Park Hong
  • John Ashbery
  • Robert Pinsky
  • Charles Bernstein
  • Harmony Holiday
  • Rae Armantrout
  • Noelle Kocot
  • Richard Greenfield
  • Amy King
  • Jennifer Kronovet
  • Jessica Baran
  • Maureen N. McLane

Microreview: Adam Fitzgerald, The Late Parade

A rowdy, erudite debut collection.

  • Julian B. Gewirtz
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