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

Wisława Szymborska

‘No One Thinks in Esperanto’

A selection from Wislawa Szymborska’s anonymous advice column.

August 19, 2021 issue

Ann Lauterbach

Hand (Giotto)

a poem

August 19, 2021 issue

Ed Vulliamy

The Vindication of Sanora Babb

Eighty years after her novel about farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl was shelved, Babb’s remarkable writing is finally coming out of America’s literary shadows.

August 19, 2021 issue

Ben Lerner

The Lights

a poem

July 22, 2021 issue