Poetry

Labors of Love

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

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

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

Maya C. Popa

Turkey Vultures

a poem

January 13, 2022 issue

Lynn Emanuel

My Eurydice

a poem

December 16, 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

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

The Latest

Jacek Dehnel

In Response to the Lady at a Reading Who Asked What the Job of a Poet Is

a poem

February 10, 2022 issue

Hermione Lee

Regarding the Solace of Others

Michael Ignatieff’s moving book explores how consolation has been configured in different eras and suggests what we might learn from individual examples of “the human experience.”

February 10, 2022 issue

Jessica Greenbaum

Ode to February in New York

a poem

February 10, 2022 issue

Cyrus Console

Laxness

a poem

January 13, 2022 issue

W.H. Auden

‘We get the Dialectic fairly well’

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

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