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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

For the past few years, I have been engaged in an intense argument with myself. This argument reached a climax last May, a few moments after I saw the film […]

Today’s classrooms are battlegrounds for political and cultural conflicts. Are teachers prepared to serve on the front lines? Despite being set at a school, Lau Yee-Wa’s debut novel Tongueless provides […]

Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles does what poems ought to do—attempt to give us experience, the derivative of event, the lines that represent acceleration in describing the actual speedometer markings. It’s […]