Admirers of Muriel Rukeyser have been waiting for a reprint of The Book of the Dead, long out of print, and West Virginia University Press’s new edition does not disappoint. […]
Read MoreReviews
In the 7 May 2018 issue of the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson reviewed Jenny Xie’s debut poetry collection Eye Level, winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman award. Of her collection […]
Read MoreWhen I described Xhenet Aliu’s Brass to a friend as a story about a teenage girl’s complicated relationship with her single mother, she said, “I’m not really a fan of […]
Read MoreCherokee Road Kill is an important book written by a poet in command of her craft. I first met Celia Bland some years ago in a workshop with the marvelous […]
Read MoreAs I am writing this in the summer of 2018, more than two thousand migrant children are being kept at the U.S.-Mexico border and around the United States, separated from […]
Read More[an excerpt] Men and women are not only themselves, Somerset Maugham writes in The Razor’s Edge (1944), “they are also the region in which they were born, the city […]
Read MoreWhen I was fourteen, about a year after being assaulted by a volleyball coach, a feminist teacher introduced me to women’s poetry. She gave me Adrienne Rich and Ai; Sylvia […]
Read MoreA necessary tension in memoir is that between the individual at the center of it and the broader context—the cultural or historical moments shaping the author’s trajectory into our lives. […]
Read MoreIn Oceanic, her luminous fourth collection of poems, Aimee Nezhukumatathil concludes with the image of “a child stepping / out of a fire, shoes / still shiny and clean.” I encountered […]
Read MoreEvery biography—in a way, every book—invites readers to examine their own lives, the more we share with their subjects the more so. Jonathan Blunk’s James Wright: A Life in Poetry, […]
Read MoreKaveh Akbar’s debut poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is about the essential consequences of incarnation, is a sensory catalog of wounds and wonders, vices and pleasures. His poems—fragmented, […]
Read MorePoets have been lamenting the recalcitrance of language at least since Byron’s Childe Harold complained in the early nineteenth century that he had not found “words which are things.” Approaching […]
Read More