Tomas Tranströmer’s Baltics, a long poem, first appeared in 1974, but this time around Samuel Charters has added a new afterword to his original translation, and his wife Ann Charters…
Jericho Brown’s Please explores the way love and violence coexist with each other and how the two sometimes intertwine. The collection of poems is categorized by four sections: “Repeat,” “Pause,”…
A winning selection in the 2011 National Poetry Series, Julianne Buchsbaum’s The Apothecary’s Heir interrogates the wildness of nature, the decadence of urban sprawl, and the necessity of myth and…
Seattle’s renowned independent press, Wave Books, recently published Hoa Nguyen’s third full-length collection of poems, As Long As Trees Last. In it, Nguyen once again dares to experiment with form,…
I’ve visited exactly half of the states that make up our federal constitutional republic. I’m counting states that I’ve lived in, vacationed in, or merely driven through. Some of the…
Described as covering “freely floating topics,” the BOMBlog interview with Dean Young disproves discontinuity within its first few moments: “Now is always unprecedented and sudden.” Young talks about his writing process in phrasing that’s as…
I’m writing this on Tuesday, November 6, Election Day. Full disclosure, today I will vote to reelect the president. As John F. Kennedy once said, “You can milk a cow…
Feather Somehow, I thought you’d want to eat alone, A state you’d grown to master—brandy glass, A man behind your chair to fill your plate, A girl to bring you…
What Is Amazing by Heather Christle is another illustration of my frustration with the word “critic,” why I think “appreciator” is a closer approximation and why I’m still open to…
I first discovered Renga: A Chain of Poems (Brazillier, 1972) in a used bookstore in New York during my first year of graduate school. I was transfixed.