Reviews

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 […]

One does not need to understand the world to artistically express it. In fact, it seems that often the latter occurs in the terrifying moments when the former is revealed […]

When my children were toddlers, they enjoyed a lift-the-flap book by author and illustrator Karen Katz called Where Is Baby’s Mommy? I found the title both amusing and alarming. Why […]

Last November I tuned in to the latest episode of the newsmagazine 60 Minutes with great interest. I’ve been watching since I was a child—back then it was our weekly […]

How do we begin to comment on the legacies, dreams, and stories of our ancestors? How could we not comment? What if we never knew a grandparent or ancestor personally […]

What is the sonnet’s relationship to place? Phillis Levin, in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, defines the genre through spatial terms: “The sonnet is a monument of praise, a […]