Poetry

Ashbery’s Cliffhangers

John Ashbery’s first posthumous collection is a reminder that collage and other formal experiments have always been central to his work.

September 23, 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

Brenda Wineapple

Dickinson’s Improvisations

A new edition of Emily Dickinson’s Master letters highlights what remains blazingly intense and mysterious in her work.

July 1, 2021 issue

Ange Mlinko

Bard of New Jersey

There’s tremendous showmanship in August Kleinzahler’s language, the power to leap from dainty diction to grotesque vocabulary within the space of a single line.

December 2, 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

The Latest

Robert Pogue Harrison

Labors of Love

Inspired new translations of Dante’s Purgatorio are faithful to its message of rehabilitation, reconciliation, and redemption.

December 16, 2021 issue

W.H. Auden

‘We get the Dialectic fairly well’

a poem

December 16, 2021 issue

Dan Chiasson

Frost at Midnight

A new, beautifully edited volume of Robert Frost’s letters finds him at the height of his artistic powers while suffering a series of losses almost unimaginable to the fortunate among us.

December 16, 2021 issue

Lynn Emanuel

My Eurydice

a poem

December 16, 2021 issue

Colm Tóibín

Father & Son

a poem

December 2, 2021 issue

Rae Armantrout

On Melancholy

a poem

December 2, 2021 issue

Christopher Benfey

Exile on Main Street

A new book argues that Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology helped overturn old notions of the virtuous New England village as the prototype of American life.

December 2, 2021 issue

Rae Armantrout

Lapse

a poem

December 2, 2021 issue

Joe Moshenska

Milton, Freud, and My Cousin Hymie

I found in Paradise Lost an unexpected affinity among its author, the psychoanalyst, and myself. What the anti-Semite Ezra Pound called the poet’s “beastly hebraism” held the key.

November 9, 2021

Charlie Smith

I Am Your Lifeguard

a poem

November 18, 2021 issue