Poetry

Rococo Risks

With Venice, her latest collection of poems, Ange Mlinko offers an account of motherhood at a crossroads, now that art and mortality share an empty nest.

September 22, 2022 issue

Jennifer Wilson

The First Russian

An unfinished novel about his African great-grandfather provides the best sense of how Pushkin considered his own Blackness.

August 18, 2022 issue

Catherine Nicholson

Improving Paradise

For Milton, innocence was interesting—a significant innovation on his biblical source material.

June 23, 2022 issue

Geoffrey Nutter

Toy Apple Beauty

a poem

September 22, 2022 issue

Wendy Xu

Little Emperor of Solstice

a poem

September 22, 2022 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

Joshua L. Freeman

Uighur Poets of Exile

It is precisely because of poetry’s power in Uighur culture that these three poets, along with nearly every other prominent Uighur intellectual, disappeared more than two years ago into China’s internment camps.

August 13, 2020

Caryl Phillips

Derek Walcott in New York

Derek Walcott had many New Yorks, and all of them played a part in his life and in his evolution as a writer. But perhaps the most important of all his New York sojourns was the one from the Fifties.

July 29, 2020

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

Emily Berry

Last Poem

a poem

October 20, 2022 issue

Tomas Unger

Alcaraz vs. Cilic

a poem

October 20, 2022 issue

Mark Ford

‘An Age of Prudence’

On the centenary of The Waste Land, the archives continue to yield new information about Eliot and his life.

October 20, 2022 issue

Anahid Nersessian

LA Elegies

Two poets take up meter and rhyme to consider the city of Blade Runner and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

October 20, 2022 issue

Robert Macfarlane

A Fireball from the Sands

Ecocide, toxic masculinity, fear of death, and more: the Epic of Gilgamesh’s themes could be transcribed from yesterday’s newspaper.

October 20, 2022 issue

Vona Groarke

Passage

a poem

October 6, 2022 issue

Hermione Lee

Poet of the Dispossessed

Joseph Roth was unwavering in his passion for the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire, which inspired his greatest novel, his hatred of nationalism, and his prophetic and courageous loathing for the Nazis. About everything else, as a new biography shows, he had violently mixed feelings.

October 6, 2022 issue