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

Brenda Wineapple

Dickinson’s Improvisations

A new edition of Emily Dickinson’s Master letters highlights what remains blazingly intense and mysterious in her work.

July 1, 2021 issue

Joe Dunthorne

Medicine

a poem

July 1, 2021 issue

Maya Abu al-Hayyat, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

I Burn Time

a poem

July 1, 2021 issue

Catherine Nicholson

The Triumph of Mutabilitie

Edmund Spenser’s long, daunting The Faerie Queen combines political allegory with some of the most flickering, ambiguous poetry in English.

July 1, 2021 issue

Shane McCrae

In the Ditch in Which the Camera Finds My Body

a poem

June 10, 2021 issue

Andrea Cohen

Bunker

a poem

June 10, 2021 issue

Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

Santiago de Compostela

a poem

May 27, 2021 issue

Rae Armantrout

a poem

May 27, 2021 issue

John Ashbery

From The History of Photography (1993)

a poem

May 13, 2021 issue

Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell

C.V.

a poem

May 13, 2021 issue

The latest releases from New York Review Books

Shop Now

Trots and Bonnie

Shary Flenniken

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man

Thomas Mann

Good Behaviour

Molly Keane

Pere Gimferrer

Gallery of Clouds

Rachel Eisendrath

After Lorca

Jack Spicer

Shop Now

Subscribe and save 50%!

Get immediate access to the current issue and over 20,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

Already a subscriber? Sign in