Reviews

Mass detention and deportation forces many to leave the country they call home to return to the country the government designates as their home. William Archila’s timely book of poems provides much-needed sociopolitical introspection and asks what it means to …

Writing to a good friend on November 22, 1817, the twenty-two-year-old John Keats dismisses the idea that “Worldly Happiness” is something that can be sought after or arrived at. “I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness—I look not for it …

The son of a preacher takes to the center of the makeshift stage at a juke joint, hastily converted from an abandoned cotton mill to a place of revelry. He strums the strings of a silver guitar and pours open …

A book can be well-reviewed and judiciously praised yet still be underappreciated. Reviews must concentrate on telling what happens and why that seems to matter. Critical essays can take on different tasks. They can assume the work they are considering …

It is a strange thing to visit a museum these days—especially in Washington, D.C. I have restlessly visited galleries in this town for almost twenty years; in fact, I moved here largely because of the city’s large network of free …

Ecological poetry is at its most potent not when it explicates its cultural or historical milieu, but when it stages its own inability to do so. Or at least this is the stance of some of the major academic texts …

The first time I saw fireflies, I squinted to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. They twinkled in a tree outside my friend’s home in Princeton, New Jersey, flashing on and off to their own rhythm. Closing the car door …

We live in an age suspicious of beauty. And why not? Aesthetic matters can feel like distractions and luxuries in light of the more pressing concerns of morality and social relations: friendship, atrocity, divorce, the rise of the authoritarian character, …

He who saves a nation violates no law.

—Donald J. Trump, plagiarizing the character   
    Napoleon, in Rod Steiger’s Waterloo (1970)

They boast that America is the “cradle of liberty;” if it is, I fear they have rocked the child …