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Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Florida. Her fifth book of poems is Distant Mandate. (May 2019)

IN THE REVIEW

A View Beyond the Personal

John Koethe

Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016

by John Koethe
“Major American poetry is the best philosophy ever written on this continent,” Marilynne Robinson once wrote. I wonder what John Koethe would say about that. Author of The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought (1996) and Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (2005), Koethe was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the …

Holding It Together

Hey, Marfa

by Jeffrey Yang, with paintings and drawings by Rackstraw Downes

Baby, I Don’t Care

by Chelsey Minnis
Is free verse dead? It has been obvious for some time that the unrhymed, unmetered, anecdotal, or monological personal utterance, distinguished by something known as “voice” (as in “finding your voice”) has gone stale; that some esteemed lyric poets, like Terrance Hayes or Natasha Trethewey, have turned back to time-honored …

A Midsummer Night’s Work

Was it you, presenting in the evening bougainvillea as a hummingbird again, you voluptuary, dual febrile wings ashine as a seamstress’s spool, hovering over the brachts with power tools to fix a beam or caulk the cracks? …

Whole Earth Troubadour

W.S. Merwin in the palm forest at the Merwin Conservancy, Haiku, Hawaii, 2011

The Essential W.S. Merwin

edited by Michael Wiegers

Garden Time

by W.S. Merwin
W.S. Merwin is the author of almost fifty volumes of poems and translations as well as eight books of prose fiction and nonfiction. He has maintained his fidelity to this early vision of poetry, bequeathed by Pound and summed up in his famous line from The Spirit of Romance: “All ages are contemporaneous.” Translation has freed Merwin to refuse stultifying academic appointments. It has facilitated his travels—despite the French farmhouse, he led a fairly peripatetic life before settling in Hawaii in the late 1970s. But most of all, translation has provided him with “the literary world. Another plane of existence.” In other words, a grand company continually needing rescue from the abyss, an ennobling endeavor, a way to communicate across time and space.