Literature

Poetry

Ange Mlinko

The Shoals of Prose

Recent books of prose by two of our best poets suggest the importance of criticism to the development of a poet’s work.

December 19, 2024 issue

Robyn Creswell

Bewildered Rhapsodies

The difficult history of translating a miraculous text

February 13, 2025 issue

Adam Kirsch

In Search of Fullness

In his new book, the philosopher Charles Taylor looks at modern poetry as a unique record of spiritual experience in a secular age.

December 5, 2024 issue

Langdon Hammer

‘The Kingdom of Ends’

Though he began writing near the end of the twentieth century, the poet Reginald Shepherd remained an unapologetic modernist who believed firmly in the autonomy of art.

November 21, 2024 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Speaking the Unspeakable

The Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah asks what it would mean—aesthetically, morally, politically—to write a good poem about genocide.

October 17, 2024 issue

Fintan O’Toole

No Comfort

As we encounter Shakespeare’s tragedies it becomes terrifyingly clear that we are not in a moral universe of comeuppances and rewarded virtues.

June 6, 2024 issue

Ange Mlinko

Transatlantic Flights

The collected poems of Denise Levertov and Anne Stevenson suggest what a poet can gain by expatriation, in both directions between England and the United States.

May 23, 2024 issue

Miranda Seymour

A Hectic Life

The bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death is an opportunity to ask what a witty dandy with the flamboyant attitudes of a raucously chauvinistic age can offer today’s world.

April 4, 2024 issue

New Poems

Jorie Graham

Who

April 24, 2025 issue

Laura Kolbe

Still

April 10, 2025 issue

Witold Wirpsza, translated from the Polish by Ann Frenkel and Gwido Zlatkes

Combustion

April 10, 2025 issue

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

J.T. Townley

Ocracoke

a poem

March 27, 2025 issue

Fady Joudah

Barzakh

a poem

March 27, 2025 issue

Catherine Nicholson

A Milton for All Seasons

The many radical rereadings of Paradise Lost

March 27, 2025 issue

Langdon Hammer

Grandfather’s Bible

In the world of her grandparents in rural Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Bishop found a deep well of inspiration—and Christian beliefs she would always struggle against.

February 23, 2025

Marianne Boruch

Old Passports

a poem

March 13, 2025 issue

Mark Ford

Poetry After Flossenbürg

A new biography of Anthony Hecht shows that his life was as various and unexpected as his poems, which evolved from modernist pastiche to extended experiments with the dramatic monologue.

March 13, 2025 issue

Amy Woolard

Delivery

a poem

February 27, 2025 issue

Christopher Benfey

‘A Loving Caw from a Nameless Friend’

A new collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters reveals them to be a major literary achievement, related to her poems and perhaps exceeding them in experimental energy.

February 27, 2025 issue

Maria Galina, translated by Ainsley Morse

from Nineveh

a poem

February 13, 2025 issue

Aaron Poochigian

Bash Bish Falls

a poem

February 13, 2025 issue