Poetry

Lovesick for a God

A new translation of the Tiruvāymoli vividly reveals the inner life of a devotee enraptured by Vishnu’s presence and made desperate by his absence.

May 27, 2021 issue

Colm Tóibín

‘We Must Be Light!’

What emerges most strongly from James Merrill’s collected letters is their lightness of touch, lightness of spirit, and the quality of affection on display.

June 10, 2021 issue

Gillian White

A Month in the Life

A new edition of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory helps us rediscover a poet whose experiments create a new relationship between poem and reader.

January 14, 2021 issue

Kamran Javadizadeh

‘The Roots of Our Madness’

John Berryman was central to American poetry’s personal turn, yet his Dream Songs made the racialization of that turn—and the whiteness of the lyric tradition—explicit.

April 8, 2021 issue

Ben Lerner

Past Imperfect

Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock is eerily appropriate for a time when a pandemic has suspended the normal temporal rhythms for so many of us, while laying bare our mortally uneven relationship to those rhythms.

February 25, 2021 issue

Evan Kindley

To Err Is Poetic

The poetry canon is dotted with mistakes large and small; why do some critics seem attached to reading these errors as intentional?

February 11, 2021 issue

Landscape painting, Tang dynasty era (618–907)

Madeleine Thien

Poems Without an ‘I’

In Chinese poetry, fiction, and philosophy, the “I” is not the nerve center from which thought and knowledge begin.

October 8, 2020 issue

Ange Mlinko

‘The Splendour and the Sting’

The passionate voices and formal experiments of two poets who should no longer be neglected.

December 17, 2020 issue

The Latest

Richie Hofmann

At the Rustic Hamlet Built in 1783 for Marie Antoinette, Last Queen of France

a poem

November 4, 2021 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

‘Magic Sayings by the Thousands’

At the heart of the Kalevala is the shamanistic power of words to transform, lead astray, destroy, create, or bring back to life.

November 4, 2021 issue

Declan Ryan

‘I Work and I Remember’

In Lawrence Joseph’s poetry there’s no escape from the memories of his formative, difficult years in Detroit.

November 4, 2021 issue

Susan Barba

For the Growers and the Grocers

a poem

November 4, 2021 issue

Jorie Graham

They Ask Me

a poem

October 21, 2021 issue

Matthew Aucoin

The More Fraught the Better

Throughout The Rake’s Progress, the steady friction between Stravinsky’s music and Auden’s poetry creates a musico-poetic compound that brims with energy and life.

October 21, 2021 issue

Fady Joudah

Carousel

a poem

October 21, 2021 issue

Ed Park

A Poet’s-Eye View

Yi Sang, Korean literature’s perpetual enfant terrible, was not only a cutting-edge writer but a working architect, and his oeuvre teems with dark rooms, mirror worlds, and other uncanny spaces.

October 21, 2021 issue

Clare Bucknell

Wits’ End

Pat Rogers’s new book is salutary because it gives us a modern sense of Alexander Pope, a figure usually portrayed as ultra-traditional.

October 21, 2021 issue

Anahid Nersessian

The Escape Artist

Richard Zenith takes a panoramic approach to Fernando Pessoa’s biography, setting the writer’s orderly, insular way of life against the riotous backdrop of the early twentieth century.

October 7, 2021 issue