poetry
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Jazzy Danziger: The Last Poem I Loved, “Epithalament” by Brenda Shaughnessy
Contrary to popular belief, language is not flat, passionless, clichéd and dying, and if you disagree, it’s imperative that you read Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “Epithalament” as soon as possible. Language must be “weirded” if it’s going to make the ordinary…
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It Begins to Look Like Courtesy
Carl Phillips is a masterful maker of sweet visual dances that are never cloying.
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David Peak: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, Horror Vacui
This is the one I return to, sometimes several times a year. The term “Horror Vacui” has two definitions, both of which serve as a useful framework while skirting the abyss hinted at throughout Heise’s alternately gloomy and beautiful poems.
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Tinkering With the Closed Box
Cyborgia is wildly imaginative and the poems don’t take themselves too seriously. Even when these women are being constructed or destroyed, the book isn’t particularly angry or even political. It instead feels rather gleeful.
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The Ultimate in Recycling
It’s just a coincidence that I’ll be teaching the Wendell Berry poem “Enriching the Earth” tomorrow, a poem which ends with the lines “And so what was heaviest / and most mute is at last raised up into song,” but…
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It Ninja-Stars Me
The voice that animates The French Exit is smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn’t so much distort…
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The Return of Tri-Quarterly
Last year, you might remember, it looked like the journal Tri-Quarterly was a goner. Lots of concerns–valid one, I want to note–about how well the journal would go through the change from a print journal to an online one, especially…
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Between Good and Bad, Right and Wrong
James Longenbach’s fourth book of poems, The Iron Key, feels like it has itself arrived from a different era.
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The Range of Your Amazing Nothing
Lina ramona Vitkauskas asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be at odds, offering her reader startling juxtapositions vis a vis…
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A Poetry Bestseller?
On the first day of every semester in my poetry classes, I ask my students if they can name a single living poet. About one in three classes comes up with Maya Angelou. Every couple of years I might get…
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Mortal Geography
Alexandra Teague’s charted worlds range from the exotic to the quotidian, from Tikal to a San Francisco classroom.
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Nothing Can Outlast Its Loss
[Nick Laird’s] steps are sure, his undermusic and undercurrents consistently strong. On Purpose is a slim volume that contains multitudes.