"The coherence Shapiro prizes is both more thorough and more thoroughgoing than that offered by a moralizing intelligence. His poetry comes by its sad wisdom through its accomodations to human happens
In El Dorado, Peter Campion explores what it feels like to live in America right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Splicing cell-phone chatter with translations of ancient poems, jump
The poems in this, W. S. Di Piero's fifth collection of poetry, are animated by an ancient vision of the human state as existing somewhere between the divine and the bestial; tense with the compulsion
We often ask ourselves what gets lost in translation—not just between languages, but in the everyday trade-offs between what we experience and what we are able to say about it. But the visionary
At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetry is the idea of the hinge—the point of connection, of openings and closings. Maggie Dietz situates herself in the liminal
Fleet River traces the journey of two travelers through landscapes earthly and otherworldly, following the river as it turns, dips underground, then reemerges unexpectedly as they fall in love with th
At the heart of Gail Mazur's The Common is the refusal to simplify what is paradoxical in our world and a recognition of the tensions in our own divided nature. These unflinching poems create a place
The Worry of the Far RightThe Reverend Donald Wildmon, executive directorOf the American Family Association in Tupelo,Mississippi, birthplace of Elvis Presley, he who?Unleashed the libido of a generat
This World and That OneSometimes you defy it,I am not that, watching a strangercry like a dog when she thinks she’s aloneat the kitchen window, hands forgottenunder the running tap.The curtains blow o
In his first book of poems since his highly acclaimed June-tree, Peter Balakian continues to define himself as one of the most distinctive voices of his generation. Exploring history, self, and imagin
A meditation on the nature of betrayal, the constraints of identity, and the power of narrative, the lyric monologues in Troy, Unincorporated offer a retelling, or refraction, of Chaucer’s tragedy Tro
Raptor, the second book by the author of the widely praised Citizen, is a collection of formal poems and measured free verse unified by its investigation of our ancient poetic, mythic, and scientific
Milton’s GodWhere I-95 meets The Pike,a ponderous thunderhead floweredstewed a minute, then flippedlike a flash card, tatterededges crinkling in, linings so darkwith excessive brightthat, standing, wa
A new inclusiveness, a heady freedom, grounded in the facts of mortality, inform Gail Mazur’s recent poems, as if making them has served as both a bunker and a promontory, a way to survive, and to be
In the hands of Bruce Smith, devotions are momentary stops to listen to the motor of history. They are meditations and provocations. They are messages received from the chatter of the street and from
