Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Poetry

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

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

Francesca Wade

‘The Sanctuary of Pure Expression’

A new biography of Mina Loy shows that the roving modernist saw artistic genius as a means to self-reinvention.

February 9, 2023 issue

Caryl Phillips

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

Ange Mlinko

The Transplanted Ironist

Iman Mersal’s feminism manifests not as a creed but as a tone, a disposition toward life and love.

December 22, 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

Ishmael Reed

A New Flame for Black Fire

What will be the legacy of the Black Arts Movement?

January 14, 2023

Susan Barba, illustrated by Leanne Shapton

Language of the Field

What hold do wildflowers have on the land, and on our hearts and tongues?

October 26, 2022

New Poems

Andrea Cohen

Purchase

April 6, 2023 issue

Zuyi Zhao

The Garden Between Days

April 6, 2023 issue

Oleh Kostarev, translated by Tatiana Retivov

An Airplane or a Helicopter

April 6, 2023 issue

The Latest

Anahid Nersessian

The Couple Form

Two new poetry collections embrace the potential of traditional forms and of breaking away from them.

April 6, 2023 issue

Nick Laird

Auden’s Dialectic

In Auden’s complete poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, the poet veers from puckish youth to adult diagnostician and back again.

April 6, 2023 issue

Lauren K. Watel

The Island

a poem

March 23, 2023 issue

Will Harris

Cuttlefish

a poem

March 23, 2023 issue

Frederick Seidel

A Giraffe Eating a Swan

a poem

March 9, 2023 issue

Jesse Nathan

What the Cedar May Have Said

a poem

March 9, 2023 issue

Michael Dirda

‘Devilish Agencies at Work’

Walter de la Mare, a poet and writer of weird tales, once counted T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene among his admirers, and now his ghost stories persist with an underground influence.

March 9, 2023 issue

Tatiana Hollier

Enheduanna’s Brutal Muse

The poetry of the oldest known author, an Akkadian priestess in ancient Mesopotamia, transformed a goddess of fertility into a deity of destruction.

February 16, 2023

Alan Felsenthal

Self-Portrait

a poem

February 23, 2023 issue

Farnoosh Fathi

from ‘Twenty Collars’

a poem

February 23, 2023 issue

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