Marge Piercy’s unflinching clarity of vision continues to be the kind of sturdy example so vital to literature. She has long been teaching and in the public arena, on the humane side of almost every contemporary issue. …more

Ariana Reines’ Coeur De Lion makes me want to drink and have sex. Not frilly drinks but hard strong liquor, and not just any sex, but the stuff of human explosions. …more

In three very different but equally gorgeous sections, Griffith guides us through every poetic form from sonnet to villanelle, all while examining the idea of what it means to be in one place instead of all others, what it means not to know your own momentum and position at the same time, to never see the moon from every window. …more

These poems are often about the strange, complex and imperfect mapping of nature—human and wild—onto our 21st century lives. …more

These poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea. …more

This is an intelligent and well-crafted poetry that demands multiple readings. And it is a voice–perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience–that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel. …more

These are poems that want to be breathless, that want to mirror the intensity of passion and desire and heartbreak, and leave the reader light-headed. …more

Goldbarth still infuses his poems with an old-fashioned, childlike wonder at the marvels of our world, along with a bemused chuckle at the ways in which we so obviously fall short of our lofty goals. …more

I’ve been told that it’s harder to make friends once you are an adult because in order to be close to someone you have to be vulnerable.

I was told this as though it is impossible for mature adults to be vulnerable. We just don’t do that. It’s not allowed. And that really, truly, made me sad. The idea is that you have to put away your inner turmoiled feelings and keep them to yourself in order to be the right kind of person. That disturbs me. …more

It’s not easy to explain David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, especially to a co-worker or a parent, or your wife or your wife’s friend.

First you have to tell them about the format. Yes: there are brief interviews. But you don’t hear the questions and you don’t know who is doing the interviewing or why. …more

The poems are themselves stealthy, hiding but then eventually revealing themselves to the writers. Or the stealth writers, both Seaton and Ace autonomous and authentic somewhere in that collaborative voice. …more

The moment when a new book is begun it is a moment that vibrates, as potential energy (a writer’s wisdom distilled into a completed work, printed, bound, placed in your hands), converted slowly into kinetic energy (second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day) with each turn of the page. …more

Haunted by the paradoxes associated with Shakerism that both glorified and doomed it, Kirchwey uses the place of Mount Lebanon to explore a layering of spaces and themes that accesses vast time and situation. …more

The Weary World Rejoices has its unadorned moments of grief, punctuated by moments of energetic wit and intelligent levity. …more

“When the imminent demise of the great writer Prétextat Tach became public knowledge—he was given two months to live—journalists the world over requested private interviews with the eighty-year-old gentleman. …Monsieur Tach viewed his diagnosis [of the rare Elzenveiverplatz Syndrome, cartilage cancer] as a hitherto unhoped for ennoblement: with his hairless, obese physique—that of a eunuch in every respect except for his voice—he dreaded dying of some stupid cardiovascular disease.”

And then the unsuspecting journalists begin to arrive for their long, sharp, demeaning lashings. Prétextat Tach isn’t just a genius; he’s a misanthropic, crazed blowhard. …more

Coleman’s work is functional and communal; she wields the oral tradition in a way that reflects her poetry ancestry—the blues queen, Koko Taylor, for example, or the fringe Beat genius, Bob Kaufman—but she also shows planed, hewn lines of intellectual poem-making. …more

Was there ever a place greyer, wetter or lonelier than Paris in the fall?

For an Irish person, that’s a weighty question to consider. I guess that in some other incarnation of myself I might have found the glistening cobblestones of Montmartre immeasurably romantic but with my fiancé away on tour and being (scarcely) self-employed, the dampness weighed down heavily on my mood, pushing me into a period of semi-hibernation. …more

Innovation is at the heart of these poems, and King’s ability to see through the surface to the deeper and often disconnected intricacies of life make them pleasurable and powerful to read. …more

What is a woman’s place in a world full of overwhelmingly masculine ideas and works? Marthe Reed, in her newest book of poetry, Gaze, examines the many intersections between women and modern society as a whole. …more

Rumpus contributor Chloe Caldwell’s book of essays, Legs Get Led Astray, will be released this April. You can pre-order the collection from the Future Tense Books website.

“Legs Get Led Astray is a provocative collection of essays that vividly rockets the reader through one young woman’s life. Chloe Caldwell beautifully and bluntly escorts you through her childhood dreams, her first loves, her most unguarded sexual exploits, bookstore crushes, babysitting jobs, heartbroken wanderlust, and the suicide of a lost lover.”

A Fire-Proof Box is a porous work, languages overlapped, breathing, an English translation that manages to capture the icy weight of classically “Russian” sensibilities. …more

The most frustrating part of not being able to keep quiet about the willful ways in which people are perfectly happy to enable the status quo is that when you voice concerns about the lack of diversity in any given arena, you are automatically positioned as that person, the shrill and humorless obsessive who simply cannot let things be. …more

One of the first things that became apparent while reading Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins was a gentle spiraling, a contracting of the scope of the novel, from the streets of Bulawayo to the small village of Kezi via the local gathering place Thandabantu; from Thenjiwe and her unnamed lover to her sister Nonceba; contracting into a pinpoint during the murder of Thenjiwe and the rape and mutilation of Nonceba. Flowing with the narrative are lyrical descriptions of the landscape and the “intoxicating scent of marula seeds falling everywhere,” all welcoming the reader into the heart of Zimbabwe. …more

The book’s strongest moments are often its quietest, as when the complexity of the speaker’s engagement with himself and the world is repulsed or rerouted by automatic prompts and alienation. …more

In Sancta, divinity irradiates. The afterlife approaches nuclear, dangerous and fascinating, a mysterium tremendum fascinans that can kill you with overexposure. …more

Have you ever read a book about a sensational event that isn’t sensational itself? That manages to transcend the shocking element to reveal a much more interesting and nuanced story, which then helps you begin to comprehend, even if not accept, the things that happen in extraordinary circumstances? …more

Out of reverence for the body’s irreducibility, Mort’s keeps strictly close to the phenomenal world, thereby freeing her imagination to honor all the body’s modes: five-fold sensuality, hunger as well as lust, youth and aging, selfishness and tender community. …more

I read Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond in a hotel room.

Nowhere fancy: I was in Asheville, North Carolina, facing nothing more uncomfortable than bugs and frogs and humidity, the steady chatter of fat people plunking themselves into the swimming pool outside. …more

We were in the “international bookstore” of Xiamen, China, which is really a Chinese junk and bookstore but has half a dozen shelves of English books (such as Gossip Girl and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). My wife found a Signet Classics edition of The Brothers Karamazov. “Do you want that?” she asked. “You do, don’t you? It looks boring.”

“I’ve already read it,” I said. …more

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1977 novel, begins with an epigraph–a quote from Salvador Elizondo’s The Graphographer–about the watery line between reality and its representation in language.

“I write,” it begins. “I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am writing and I can also see myself seeing that I am writing.” …more