Poetry

A Life of Sheer Will

The Lebanese writer and painter Etel Adnan’s urgent need to see and document and create in every form earned her a cultlike status around the world.

June 8, 2023 issue

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

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

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

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

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

Poets on Poets

Charles Simic

Poems from the Abyss

When asked about his home, Czesław Miłosz said that he came from another planet, another time

November 23, 2017 issue

Dan Chiasson

Crossing the Invisible Line

The astonishing work of poet Eileen Myles set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match.

March 24, 2016 issue

Ange Mlinko

Acts of Extreme Attention

Karen Solie, the consummate poet of the Trans-Canadian Highway, has taken an evolutionary leap with her recent poetry, trading comedy for sublime beauty.

November 21, 2019 issue

John Ashbery

The Book that No One Knows

David Schubert’s poetry is like opening a window in a room that had become stuffy without one’s realizing it.

October 5, 2000 issue

The Latest

Devin Johnston

Poem

a poem

October 5, 2023 issue

Claire DeVoogd

Dream (as the Boat)

a poem

October 5, 2023 issue

A.E. Stallings

‘Obedient to Their Words’

As a writer who is so obviously a real person, Simonides perhaps more than any other ancient poet attracts anecdotes and stories that reflect on his character as much as his work.

October 5, 2023 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Poems to Wake the Corpses

Joyce Mansour, the Syrian-Jewish writer whom André Breton called “the greatest poet of our time,” is the latest female member of the Surrealist circle to be reintroduced to the public.

September 21, 2023 issue

Ben Lerner

The Rescue

a poem

September 21, 2023 issue

Pattie McCarthy

neap tide—autumn

a poem

September 21, 2023 issue

A.E. Stallings

Ghost Nets

a poem