Poetry

Derek Walcott in New York

Derek Walcott had many New Yorks, and all of them played a part in his life and in his evolution as a writer. But perhaps the most important of all his New York sojourns was the one from the Fifties.

July 29, 2020

Anahid Nersessian

LA Elegies

Two poets take up meter and rhyme to consider the city of Blade Runner and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

October 20, 2022 issue

Maya Jaggi

Resurrecting the Poets of Tbilisi

A new museum tells the story of the Soviet taming of Georgia’s intelligentsia. The echoes today are growing louder.

November 24, 2022 issue

Joshua L. Freeman

Uighur Poets of Exile

It is precisely because of poetry’s power in Uighur culture that these three poets, along with nearly every other prominent Uighur intellectual, disappeared more than two years ago into China’s internment camps.

August 13, 2020

Anahid Nersessian

A Vivisectional Style

A new biography of John Donne argues for the sensuality and strangeness of both his work and his life.

November 24, 2022 issue

Robert Macfarlane

A Fireball from the Sands

Ecocide, toxic masculinity, fear of death, and more: the Epic of Gilgamesh’s themes could be transcribed from yesterday’s newspaper.

October 20, 2022 issue

Dan Chiasson

Rococo Risks

With Venice, her latest collection of poems, Ange Mlinko offers an account of motherhood at a crossroads, now that art and mortality share an empty nest.

September 22, 2022 issue

Mark Ford

‘An Age of Prudence’

On the centenary of The Waste Land, the archives continue to yield new information about Eliot and his life.

October 20, 2022 issue

New Poems

Alan Felsenthal

Self-Portrait

February 23, 2023 issue

Farnoosh Fathi

from ‘Twenty Collars’

February 23, 2023 issue

Michael Hofmann

Found Poem

February 23, 2023 issue

The Latest

Anahid Nersessian

Reckoning with Silence

Dionne Brand’s poetry has the weight and sonority of prophetic utterance without a hint of melodrama.

February 9, 2023 issue

Caleb Crain

Sallies

a poem

February 9, 2023 issue

Marianne Boruch

ICE

a poem

February 9, 2023 issue

Neal Ascherson

Sonnets for the State

A new book recounts the history of the Circle of Writing Chekists, a group of officials in the East German Ministry of State Security who wrote poetry as a weapon in the class struggle.

February 9, 2023 issue