The Last Book I Loved: The Cat’s Table
For years when I was young I would crouch beneath the dinner table to watch my parents drink after-dinner coffee and wine with an ever-changing group of scientists—a tall man…
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The Grief Performance, by Emily Kendal Frey
Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair. How, you ask? For starters, the…
Inmost, by Jessica Fisher
Many of the most interesting lyric books of the past few years have attempted a sort of reckoning between contemporary life and the reality of ceaseless war. Nick Flynn’s The…
Coming to That by Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning’s Coming to That is a book full of imagination, creativity, and intellect.
Between the Crackups, by Rebecca Lehmann
Rebecca Lehmann’s collection, Between the Crackups, is a glittering, furious book. Many of its poems inhabit a childhood world full of violence and anger. Others showcase adult voices that range…
Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans
Visiting the Taos Pueblo (“an ancient community continuously inhabited for 100 years”) on San Geronimo Day, I was frightened by the Sacred Clowns (Koshares). The list of rules for visitors…
The Poems of Jesus Christ, by Willis Barnstone
Born in 1927, Willis Barnstone is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University and an admired translator . His rendering of The Poems of St John of the…
Girl In Cap and Gown by Harriet Levin
Filmgoers this year who saw the documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D (or not) entered the prehistoric Chauvet caves of Southern France in a stunning modern way. The…
Gaze by Christopher Howell
In the opening poem of Christopher Howell’s Gaze, “Home Stretch,” he concludes with, “Receive me. Here are my silver / wings, in accordance with custom. Inside of them / leaves…
A Brilliant Button Without Any Cloth
The promised west in The Oregon Trail IS The Oregon Trail is an amalgam of bootstrap romance, wilderness bordered by suburban sprawl, death, and the ferocity of natural processes.
The Last Book I Loved: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
There is a passage in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where Francie Nolan, the book’s protagonist, is described as the sum of many parts. A genetic and experiential palimpsest, Francie:
I Used to be Epic Spittle
It’s the project of the impossible, then, that makes Yau’s new collection so provocative and provoking, so worth reading, even for a reader’s or poet’s temperament that might be different…