Poetry

Browse our essays and reviews on poetry.

Microreview: Rob Schlegel, The Lesser Fields

Transition and transience govern the obsessions in this first collection.

  • Jay Deshpande

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.

  • Kathleen Rooney

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

Poems that approach death with lyricism.

  • Sean Patrick Hill

Out of Reach

Susan Howe’s, That This.

  • Richard Deming

(Most) Everyone’s Invited

Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets, 

  • Dai George

Microreview: CAConrad, The Book of Frank

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

  • Noah Eli Gordon

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Microreview: Wisława Szymborska, Here

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

  • Elisabeth Divis

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.

  • Amelia Klein

Microreview: L. S. Klatt, Cloud of Ink

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

  • Raymond McDaniel

Microreview: Grace Zabriskie, Poems

An authentic and spirited book from a longtime character actor.

  • Lynn Melnick

Prose, Thinly Disguised as an IKEA Superstore

The poetic shows up in more places than we think.

  • Vincent Czyz

Heroisms

  • Dan Beachy-Quick
  • Timothy Donnelly

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.

  • Tess Taylor

Hello Kitty

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

  • BK Fischer

Synecdoche

Kathleen Graber’s, The Eternal City, 

  • Megan Levad

Microreview: Edip Cansever, Dirty August

The first English-language translation of the Turkish poet.

  • Elizabeth Gramm

Microreview: Christian Wiman, Every Riven Thing

Poems where God is a constant presence. 

  • Kate Middleton

Microreview: Samuel Amadon, Like a Sea

Poems that present a world refracted through distracted consciousness.

  • Marina Read Weiss

Microreview: David Morley, Enchantment

The interests of a naturalist combined with Romani heritage.

  • Paul Franz

Microreview: Anthony McCann, I ♥ Your Fate

Poems whose  nabashed romanticism and faith in simple lyricism remain powerful. 

  • Nate Pritts

Album, c. 1930

  • Marjorie Welish

Our Poems, Ourselves

Does autobiography make good poetry?

  • Stephanie Burt

Microreview: Rachel Loden, Dick of the Dead

An investigation into American sexual and political consciousness with Nixon at its center. 

  • Fred Muratori

Microreview: Kate Greenstreet, The Last Four Things

Poems preoccupied with details: the concrete, physical materials of future and past. 

  • Sara Femenella
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