Strategic: 2018

Jill Chan Otoliths

"What some enlightened people attempt, from the Vanguardia to the present day, is to achieve a state of poetry in which all arts reintegrate once more. That is to say, if from one perspective we’ re talking about evolution, from another perspective we have to talk about accumulation. Stated in paradoxical form, we can afﬁrm that in poetry and in the arts containing poetry, there is progress, and there’s no progress." Mayra López, trans. Kristin Dykstra • Chicago Review (scroll down)

Jeffrey Yang NYRB

"During last February’s New York Fashion Week, the designer Tracy Reese had models strut to poetry readings on the catwalk. Even the insurance firm Nationwide is getting in on the trend; it recently released a series of commercials in which poets wax on about the miracle of a mortgage." Faith Hill and Karen Yuan The Atlantic

Leontia Flynn Irish Times

"is poems were best appreciated when read aloud, allowing all those internal rhymes and well-paced rhythms to be heard. In a hotel room in Prague, I read Dialann Bóthar to my companion from start to finish, insisting he appreciate the artistry of the sounds." Ailbhe Ni Ghearbhuigh on Liam O Muirthile Irish Times

Kate Feld The Interpreter's House

"But, for most of Western history, men cried incessantly, and mostly for themselves. In one of the first written accounts of a man crying, in the Odyssey, Odysseus is drunk, and a singer, Demodocus, is taking requests. Odysseus wants to hear the one about Odysseus—of his own adventures in the Trojan War, desperately wending his way home. Listening to someone sing of his embattled sorrows, he begins to cry. “Great Odysseus melted into tears,” Homer writes. Nothing made the man cry quite like himself. And when he finally returned home, years later, in disguise, his nurse recognized him by his weeping. His cry face was his truest self." Michael Lista • New Yorker

Victoria Chang Kenyon Review

"I have seen few photographs of the poet Jack Spicer, and none as compelling as Jonathan’ s. Spicer stands on a huge log at the bottom of a towering log pile somewhere in Mendocino County, California, in 1954. I think of him snarling on a bar stool, keeping his crew in line at the Place or some other North Beach bar. Spicer is taller in this photograph than he is in my mind’ s eye, and he has a dour expression. Perhaps he feels as out of place as he looks. Every time I look at this photograph I come away with the odd sensation that I’ m missing something, that Spicer has eluded my gaze." William Corbett Chicago Review

GC Waldrep Yale Review

"Because of this strong rootedness in narrative and in autobiography, Levine has often been unfashionable among critics and writers with more “experimental ” sensibilities. Yet his writing, as Hirsch describes it, is “a fundamentally human-centered poetry, ” and, much more than an easily epiphanic narrative poet, Levine is a careful witness to a wide range of human experience, as evidenced, among other places, in this collection’ s many poems about travel in Europe and South America." Christopher Kempf Chicago Review

Denise Riley Cumulus (scroll)

"Rather than simply articulating the dynamic of intimate online communication through poems that are non-complex in form and aim, post-internet poetry has the opportunity to exploit the ambivalence of cuteness. If a poem itself is tender and cute, an intimate expression of commodified subjectivity, an inadequate vehicle for politics in a marginal artform, perhaps it should also be monstrous and dangerous, looming over the streets and straining at its tethers.Within digital platforms, we are typically situated as both consumers and producers, in control and yet completely powerless: for Facebook, its users provide content for each other, whilst having their attention sold to advertisers; for Uber, its ‘partner drivers’ are able to ‘make money on [their] terms,’ whilst being managed, controlled and potentially ‘deactivated’ via the app.67 Our position is always cute; perhaps this way we retain the capacity for revenge." Lucy Burns and Charles Whalley Partisan Hotel

Peter Sirr Poetry Ireland Review

"Rosselli resisted the appropriation of Plath’s work by feminists, although she, like Plath, deliberately confronted gender barriers. No doubt Rosselli agreed with her fellow poet Armanda Guiducci, who wrote in Italian Women Poets (2002) that “when people speak of ‘women’s poetry’ they mean a sub-standard poetry, one that is unstructured or weak, pathetic, or sentimental. This roses and papier-maché poetry is normally compared unfavorably to ‘virile’ poetry, which we characterize as passionate, powerful, abstract, etc.”" Lisa Mullenneaux Critical Flame

Paul Muldoon TLS

"Those who are able to make a living from art will always be in a small minority. The difference between either resisting ‘professionalisation’ or identifying as a ‘professional’ poet in a more fluid sense seems to be whether we experience this as an active or passive shift, as something either structurally imposed or conscientiously adopted. Whether the reflex is to bristle or brighten at the evolving language of these debates, a clearer focus on its practical effects will help us understand the new situation it creates. Alongside questions of pay, we might come to view poetry’s occupational turn as less a threat to creative integrity than a reflection of the need to widen its opportunities." JT Welsch The Poetry Review

Maurice Riordan The Poetry Review

" The light is not dying but resurging, and even when it does begin to fade we feel it will not be raged at but accepted as a part of the natural order of things, the precursor to another Ovidian metamorphosis. The collection is wonderfully varied. There is a poem to the poet’s daughter, one on Hurricane Ophelia and one on Being a Dog; there is even a lament on the Time of Trump. All testify to the unflagging spirit of one of the very finest of Irish poets, living or dead, “still singing, still going strong”. Against the Clock gives cause for national celebration." John Banville on Derek Mahon Irish Times

Stevie Howell Hudson Review

"As an outsider, when you enter a prison for the very first time, what immediately assaults you is the blah architecture: nothing ornamental, the floor, ceilings, and walls painted an awful institutional gray or green, the lighting too bright or too dark." Tom Sleigh Yale Review

Matthew Welton Cordite

"Justice for Pablo Neruda, and for his readers, would be to acknowledge his sins without losing sight of his accomplishment—meaning his voice." David Mason Hudson Review

Addie Eliades One Sentence Poems

"For indigenous people in this country the English language is a kind of trade language. We are over five hundred federally recognized nations. There are over 220 living indigenous languages. This whole hemisphere is Indian country, from North to South, rich in many cultures, in many languages. English, Spanish, and French allow us to move about and communicate more globally. But it is our tribal languages that allow us to know ourselves intimately." Joy Harjo • poets.org

Mary Ruefle Granta

"While many post-conceptual poets continue the appropriation and transformation of pre-written texts that is central to conceptual poetry, there seems to be an increased emphasis in their work on performativity, the tangible impact of social media, and an eclecticism of styles ranging from employing appropriated texts to writing more freely." Hazel Smith Cordite

Safia Elhillo Breakwater Review

"Although there have been many calls for decolonization in literary studies, the issue remains: how does poetry include rather than exclude myriad traditions and, therefore, myriad voices? how does poetry build upon its foundations a new, decolonized canon?" Emilia Phillips • Ploughshares

Ange Mlinko Poetry

"I’m not going to lose plausible. I won’t go into how this disagreement with my editor sorted out. Both well and not well, as it happened. No one need wonder, of course, about the origins of this dismaying “new meaning” for doughty, previously admired Mr. Plausible. Ben Jonson famously put it most memorably when he noted, “Wheresoever manners and fashion are corrupt, language is. It imitates the public riot.”" Richard Ford Threepenny Review

M. NourbeSe Philip Lyrikline

"When constraints bind, they also tempt escape, provoke insubordination and defiance." R.A. Villanueva in conversation with Ali Lewis • Poetry School

Nikki Wallschlaeger Brick

"He was besotted with Jackson, bored by the philosophy and history of the Literae Humaniores course, and disturbed by a humiliating personal scandal: his solicitor father was exposed as an embezzler, and the family was plunged into insolvency. Housman retreated into two things that would become his life’s focus: painstaking reconstruction of corrupted Latin texts, and his relationship with Jackson. Neither passion, though, was on the syllabus for his final examinations, which Housman duly ploughed." Will Tosh TLS

Momtaza Mehri Poetry International Web

"[Muriel] Rukeyser’s work ought to be preserved precisely because she’s such an unwieldy candidate for feminist canonization. Bridging the old Left and the New, international and domestic politics, foremother and front-runner, her career poses profound challenges to the conventional schools and period divisions through which we narrate twentieth-century literary and political history." Sam Huber • Paris Review

Doireann Ni Ghriofa Irish Times

"The quarrel in this book is between the language-loving poet for whom one phrase deliquesces into another and the more hard-bitten and judicious figure of Autocomplete, who holds language to account, who wants an ethical warrant for his aesthetic skill." John McAuliffe Irish Times

Theresa Lola Brittle Paper

"[F]or the early [Barbara K.] Lewalski, genres exist between literature and other kinds of writing, especially Biblical and speculative, and that instead of being closed boxes, they are open channels that shuttle between fields of discourse." Roland Greene • Arcade

R. Zamora Linmark Contrappasso

"[Jose F.] Lacaba would later recall that in the course of his torture, he was told: 'You’re the one who wrote that poem in that magazine.' He did not reply. 'I was flattered that a constabulary colonel was literate enough to have heard about my poem, but he was making a statement, not asking a question, so I did not bother to confirm or deny his allegation.'" Regine Cabato • CNN Philippines

Hiwot Adilow Apiary

"When I enter the space, it is as if I’ve entered a poem—I do not know what I’ll find, everything in it is unexpected, as it is in a poem. There are other similarities between Chaudhuri’s city and a poem: one gains no information but emerges or returns from it changed (see Chaudhuri’s definition of the poem in his essay on the Gita). What are these ‘Indian Road Signs’?" Sumana Roy • Berfrois

"All of those trails that I have walked, somehow that movement is still inherent in the work. The quality of the poems, the way they meander, the way they move, feels very much like the landscape. Whether dreamscape or landscape, it is tethered to the landscape I come from." Sherwin Bitsui • Culture Trip

Aditi Machado Conjunctions

"A new set of possibilities can unsettle the poetic order, as it can the social—as when a poem doesn’t look like a poem, which most often results in its not being published." Nuar Alsadir • Granta

Rodney Jones Scoundrel Time

"But on second thought I remembered some words of my poetry teacher at Stanford, the doughty rationalist and contrarian Yvor Winters. He said that it was a patriotic good for young American poets to become college teachers, if they had a gift for it. Democracy, he told us, needed a population that had learned to use and understand language as well as possible." Robert Pinsky • Boston Globe

Kevin McIlvoy Scoundrel Time

"To wobble honestly at the edges of selfhood: it is I and not my tendentious memory that is real. I speak the words able to find the mouth. The desire to say something is sincerity enough. The poet (she because none else will) must go where speaking and not where the self leads. Otherwise we need no poets." Brandon Kreitler • Tourniquet Review

Rosmarie Waldrop Conjunctions

"Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned from my religious hybridity is that no faith has ever fully given me a home." Shivanee Ramlochan in conversation with Rajiv Mohabir • Jacket2

Jenny Bornholdt Best New Zealand Poems

"This intractable distance, one might even say deniability, is what makes Minnis’s new work, on the face of it, so breezy and clear, so hard to place at a time when a premium is being put on the idea that poetry should be legible as the reflection of a given identity position." Barry Schwabsky Hyperallergic

Aditi Machado The Spectacle

"It is radical—indeed political—to hold on to your perceptions and not adjust your perspective for the comfort or recognition of a particular audience." Nuar Alsadir in conversation with Maria Isakova Bennett • Honest Ulsterman

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John Ash PN Review

"‘Poetry is personal’, Stevens said in a lecture Moore recorded in a letter. Moore wrote complex poems about love, institutions such as marriage, femininity, virtue, the treatment of people and animals and the world around her, all the while embedding found voices and quotes that are unattributed and stripped of context to shift power dynamics, derailing commonly held beliefs. All while constructing the calmest of facades." Jena Schmitt PN Review

Donna Stonecipher The Spectacle

"I couldn’t think of anything much more self-destructive for a MFA candidate to do than to start churning out poems with titles such as 'I Am ‘So’ Stupid,' 'Lick My Face,' 'My Kangaroo,' 'Everything Nice Has a Crafted Satin Finish,' 'Squid Versus Ass Clown,' and 'Juan Valdez Has a Little Juan Valdez (i.e. Energy Cannon) in His Pants.' Such titles are, well, just plain bad. They evoke a suburban twelve year old’s fumbling misguided attempts to shock her parents." Brian M. Reed in conversation with Kevin Eagan • Critical Margins

Priscila Uppal The Compass

"Poet, novelist and playwright Priscila Uppal has died after a long battle with synovial sarcoma, a rare disease she once called “the Kick in Your Face Cancer.” She was 43." The Toronto Star

Robin Myers Sixth Finch

"In the past we [Burmese] could say we didn’t know much because the military government saw to it that this wasn’t discussed and covered in media. But what’s the excuse today? People apparently know there are armed conflicts, but they don’t know what exactly is going on including the looting, the burning of villages, the raping, the arbitrary arrests, torture, and the land grabbing being carried out by the military." Maung Day • Journal of Poetics Research

Jane Robinson Honest Ulsterman

"Kerridge writes that ‘[The Oval Window] cannot be read quickly and uninterruptedly, except as a beautiful but enigmatic surface, until a great deal of preparation has taken place – so much, that the idea of the eventual, uninterrupted reading turns into a mirage, always ahead.’ The rather obvious response to this kind of reading has two parts. The first suggests that, before Google, or getting hold of a lot of Prynne’s own supporting material, The Oval Window and much else of Prynne’s poetry would have ‘only’ been ‘a beautiful but enigmatic surface’. It is, surely, the sheer beauty of so much of Prynne’s writing which places it so ‘head and shoulders’ above almost any other British language-oriented poetry; and it is this beautiful surface which attracts any reader in the first place. The second part of this response is to suggest, somewhat cynically, that sourcing writing is a game which academics like to play." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

Lori Jakiela Diagram

"The rhythm of reading always seems to me to be a very smooth and slow one, and much more homogeneous than the rhythm of walking. Walking is staccato. You’re constantly on the outside, constantly exteriorizing, accompanied by slight and regular jolts—not at all unpleasant, but not smooth. You’re constantly aware of the outside of your body, whereas when reading we tend to go immediately to the mind of the book, which is obviously our own minds as well." Cole Swensen in conversation with Aaron Lopatin • The Spectacle

Sarah Byrne Irish Times

"Language can’t be separated from the world without separating the world from itself. That’s why Lu Chi answers, even before these predictable questions are asked, by presenting his silk sentence in conjunction with another sentence, a language sentence: “In a single meter of silk, the inﬁnite universe exists; language is a Great Flood from a small corner of the heart.” Silk, the universe, language, and the heart — he links them by creating two parallel clauses that ﬂow into each other and unite only when they have reached far beyond our ﬁeld of vision." Inger Christensen, tr Susanna Nied Poetry

Raymond John de Borja High Chair

"[W]e need the widest possible range of research that art can embody: witness, invention, provocation, exhortation, documentation, discovery, resistance, escape." Lisa Olstein in conversation with Natalie Diaz • Boston Review

Stephen Sexton Irish Times

"Every summer term, I went to talk to the documentary students before they made their film poem and left with a pile recommendations. I’d been aware of a connection between poetry and film and now it all made sense; the power of the image, how the freedom of the camera reflected poetry’s elasticity, the endless fascinating ways that film and poetry can wrap up time." Martina Evans Irish Times

Kim Kyung Ju, trans. Jake Levine Action Yes

"The Philippines is a logical yet invisible point of reference for unpacking the 'positive effects' of American imperialism repackaged via cultural diplomacy in the arena of institutionalized creative writing." Conchitina Cruz • Kritika Kultura

Ishion Hutchinson Lyrikline

"While any type of poetry necessarily has an objectively definable form that constitutes the text’s body and border, for [Agha Shahid] Ali the borders are obvious in their rigidity and yet capacious for his artistry, as the boundaries of his exilic imaginary both restrain and free his poetry." Caleb Agnew • Arcade

"However, the poet’s trajectory was also conditioned by the sad reality of a communist country. And an eternal student he was indeed – not just on the account of his curiosity; at most times, he lived from hand to mouth. He was well over fifty and his books had been translated in the West, when he hitchhiked to Greece, because he could simply not afford a train ticket." Anna Arno Versopolis

Keorapetse Kgositsile Lyrikline

"[F]inished and unfinished have nothing to do with this. The operable terms for the long poem are activity (praxis or poiesis—the practice or the making) and desire (drive, necessity, Middleton’s 'longing'). It’s the desire or drive to be endlessly making something 'all about everything,' inside poiesis. So will you have enough time to get this 'everything' in? The answer is, by definition, no—you won’t (no matter how old and still productive you manage to be)." Rachel Blau DuPlessis • Arcade

Isoje Iyi-Eweka Chou African Writing Online

"[Aime] Césaire was self-consciously preoccupied with making something new in art and politics alike, but reading his poetry today (with a stronger sense of the historical specificity of his writing) provides the present with the kind of historical investigation of blackness that [Frantz] Fanon felt was unavailable. But more important, the fact that Césaire did so through the materiality of language indicates blackness’s power for a new “communicability” not rooted in an essentialized idea of race, but in new methods of critiquing the cultural machinery that essentializes. For Césaire, new words hold the promise of new worlds." David B. Hobbs • The Nation

Collier Nogues Tongue

"[C]an we quantify Poet Voice more precisely, and if so, how common is it in this sample of 100 poets?" Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller • Journal of Cultural Analytics

"I’m struck now, as I wasn’t when I was six or seven, by the name Google Buns. The founders of Google have a different origin story for their name, but it could be that their deep, dark secret is that they were Enid Blyton fans." Bill Manhire • The Sapling

Elizabeth Metzger Tongue

"An attempt to chart the origins and evolution of modern poetry in Malaysia unearths complex historical processes and cultural interactions that have shaped contemporary Malaysian society. To speak of the writing of poetry in Malaysia, one must grapple with—or at least try to imagine—the essentially pluralist and polyglot nature of its people as well as the changing socio-cultural landscape, where 'the map of a thousand lives will be seen.'" Pauline Fan • Lyrikline

"The latter half of the twentieth century we saw something of a renaissance [among Greek writers, artists, and intellectuals]. But in the twenty-first century all this has dissolved because of the economic and cultural crisis and because of the domination of Germany. Germany has inflicted a second occupation, this time economic and cultural in the negative sense." Nanos Valaoritis • The Rumpus

A.E. Stallings New Yorker

"What I remember most of all is washing Leo Tolstoy’s ears. The year is 1989, the mornings of revolution, the year when my birth country begins to fall apart. His ears are larger than my head; I am standing on the shoulders of a boy who is standing on the shoulders of another boy." Ilya Kaminsky • New York Times

Truong Tran OmniVerse

"[I]t really depends on context—where you’re performing, whose agenda, what’s the audience. We had one concert in Harare gardens in the formative years of MDC. We had this piece Chinja Napken (Change the Nappy) and the whole crowd raised their palms with the MDC symbol, you know? And at the end of the piece, I said: 'This is not about politics, it’s all about hygiene. Change your baby’s diapers when they are soiled.' And everyone says: 'Ah! Iwe mhani unofunga kuti takapusa here?' ('Do you think we are stupid?') And everyone was laughing." Chirikure Chirikure in conversation with Netsayi Chigwendere • Chimurenga Chronic

"It was chosen because someone at the University thought it was faintly inspiring and, knowing nothing about either Kipling or Biko, didn’t think about how jarring the association was. It’s public poetry as a close cousin to those inane posters with a cat hanging off a branch and the words “Hang in there!” written on them. We can only be grateful the university officials didn’t paint “there’s no problem you can’t beat” on the walls." Stephen Bush New Statesman

Lo Kwa Mei-En jubilat

"The five poems by Charles Mungoshi crawl all over you like ants from the underworld. As you read his poems you have a feeling that you are working your difficult way around boulders, towards some treasure." Memory Chirere on contemporary Zimbabwean poetry • African Writing Online

"But when the publisher’s blurb on the cover of Heavy Years says that Augustus Young the prolific writer of poetry, prose and plays “worked as an epidemiologist for thirty years,” isn’t it a bit like saying Lemuel Gulliver was Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral? At any rate, “Augustus” has disappeared from the pages of Heavy Years: the narrator is nameless, so readers can no longer assume that he and the author are the same. In the gap all kinds of games become possible: the pseudonym as a literary device contributes to the reader’s almost subliminal sense of bewilderment." Marianne Mays Fortnightly Review

Nitoo Das Almost Island

"[I]t matters that we have the words to describe the things we are going through. Writing has been important to me because that’s where I go to figure things out or hear what others are saying. So, for all the words that I cannot make to describe what I am going through, I go to other poets and writers to see if they have come up with the words. This helps me understand racism, sexism or the idea that spaces can be gendered. People who are whites have never needed to protect themselves from anything, so in trying to protect ourselves from things we need to name the experiences." Vuyelwa Maluleke in conversation with Gaamangwe Mogawi • Africa in Dialogue

Derek Mahon Gallery (pdf)

"In the moving poem On Not Having Children, Nick Laird singles out words that have the distinction of not reproducing themselves in rhyme: “and there are words that lack rhymes: silver; month;/ depth; false. It makes them immune to doggerel/ but also to the ballad form”. He has an ear for what language betrays and, in the beautiful Incantation, for its fidelities." Kate Kellaway Observer

Aimee Nezhukumatathil Agni

"I believe that art has intrinsic value in itself, and that the creation of art should be a necessary feature of any society. I believe, therefore, that the arts should be subsidized if they cannot sustain themselves along the typical market values of capitalist societies. The challenge was always going to be to find the funds to make this possible." Kwame Dawes in conversation with Matthew Daddona • Lit Hub

Carola Luther Fortnightly Review

"As with so much else in this writing, the tenderness can unfold into very precise reflections on, for example, language, and this is case with Malroux. Cole comments on her translation of a phrase from Stevens, ‘In French, there exists no separate word to describe the total, essential , or particular being of a person (the individual self) other than the word for ‘me,’ the objective case of ‘I.’" Ian Pople The Manchester Review

Amanda Berenguer, trans. Anna Deeny Morales Almost Island

"[S]omething now being called African poetry is not served well by being framed through an ill-defined African orality combined with an equally ill-defined U.S. hip hop tradition (there are, after all, many hip hop traditions)." Keguro Macharia • New Inquiry

Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, trans. Kristine Ong Muslim Asymptote

"I come from what used to be a country of jungles. Please don’t mind me my forest (clichéd) metaphor: Tradition is the roots of the great tree; it is nurtured by its special situation, condition and make-up. A literature of genuine character and uniqueness will help to enrich world literature. So I think we have to keep the uniqueness all the time and help enrich each other. But of course even a tree changes and evolves, finding its place and special meaning in a changing situation. If it does not find this meaning it will become irrelevant." Muhammad Haji Salleh in conversation with Mohammad A. Quayum • Postcolonial Text

Janet Kaplan Dusie

"The writers I admire most are involved in a kind of sensitive and sensual labor, rather than a self-consciously political practice. I worry sometimes that affect drops out of the conversation when we focus on the political aspects of the art. Or maybe the affect becomes flattened out into mere outrage, or melancholia." Srikanth Reddy in conversation with Lucy Ives • Triple Canopy

Tony Lopez Poetry

"John Ashbery wrote that Joan Murray is by definition a poet of 'uncollectedness', of incompleteness. It seems to me that she captures a kind of exquisite isolation–a 'distant majesty'. A 'ridiculous' letter to her friend Helen Anderson ends with, 'It is splendid that you are so unalone'." Amy Key • The Poetry Review

Mark Anthony Cayanan Rogue Agent

"I was in New York waiting on a platform and it was rush hour, and it was completely silent. People were not saying anything; they were just standing there. Looking at the ground, not doing anything and not talking to each other. If I attempt to give language to this, it is that it all felt apocalyptic. I am looking at this with a deep sense of disappointment." Ladan Osman in conversation with Gaamangwe Joy Mogami • Africa in Dialogue

Regine Cabato QLRS

"I hope that the point is made in proposing a necessary criterion for good translation of poetry: do all you can to preserve the original form." Xujun Eberlein • LARB

Norman Erikson Pasaribu Asymptote

"As Orwellian specters cast shadows over our dialogue on federal surveillance, Bones Will Crow instructs us on how poets have deployed our own oft-reviled modern and postmodern techniques to bear the most high-stakes witness possible." Jerome Murphy • LARB

Heather McHugh Scoundrel Time

"I was honoured to have him accept me into the Writer’s Association after the publication of my book, ‘My First Coup D’Etat’.I am yet to know anyone who was not delighted after listening to one of those beautiful poetic renditions by Prof., which we are going to miss forever.Prof., like the eponymous ‘Rosimaya’, you have finished our Friday and wrecked the rest of our week." John Dramani Mahama on Atukwei Okai Ghanaweb

Angelo V. Suárez Gauss

"For A Dictionary of the Revolution (2014–2017), Hanafi made a 'vocabulary box' with 160 words in Egyptian colloquial Arabic. Hanafi chose words that were circulating in public discourse immediately following the 2011 revolution. The box was then used to generate conversation with over two hundred people across Egypt, in Alexandria, Aswan, Cairo, Mansoura, Sinai, and Suez. Transcriptions of these conversations functioned as raw material for the artist’s assemblage of imaginary first-person voices speaking around each of the terms." Eva Heisler • Asymptote

Andrea Brady Blackbox Manifold

"The effect of the arrival of the free market on magazines and journals was ambiguous. On the one hand, regional journals and special interest magazines flourished in areas such as Warmia, Masuria, Pomerania and Silesia. An ‘escape from the centre’ became a real option. In geographical and cultural terms, this meant breaking free of Warsaw. Politically, it implied a move away from socialist centralisation. Many new ventures were inspired and fuelled by ideas about so-called ‘small fatherlands’, which could be re-discovered or invented amidst the rubble of socialist notions of national unity. On the other hand, the quality of published journals varied and their outreach was often limited." Waldemar Kuligowski Eurozine

Raymond John de Borja Kritika Kultura

"Du Fu’s a great person to translate, but there goes eight years of your life. Finally it’s done." Stephen Owen, qtd. by Jill Radsken • Harvard Gazette

Paul Muldoon Blackbox Manifold

"Indeed, at the outset of The Criterion, Eliot famously took no salary, continuing to work full-time at Lloyds Bank and squeezing his editorial responsibilities into evenings, weekends and holidays. In this respect, he also represents the highly personal, non-professional style of editorship that intrudes into the private sphere, and not without cost to his health." Matthew Philpotts Eurozine

Jam Pascual Cha

"The whole experience [of translation] has taught me a lot about the freedom that comes through constraint." Mira Rosenthal in conversation with Emily Wolahan • Two Lines

Mohamed Al-Harthy, trans. Ibtihaj Al-Harthi Arabic Literature Today

"Translating was crucial in giving me the courage to try writing in English. Exploring the space between languages has remained essential for me. I see translating and writing as two modes of the same process. The two modes inform and cross-pollinate each other." Rosmarie Waldrop in conversation with Eric M. B. Becker • Words Without Borders

She Who Has No Master(s), trans. Genève Chao and Quan Tran

"[P]oetry, even when it is not overtly political, when it prefers the universal, when it is staunchly private, if not blatantly apolitical, or when it is fiercely formally experimental to the point of illegibility, is nevertheless already a form of consciousness-raising, say, by cultivating attentiveness to language, to structures of thinking, to the idea of an other, to a self who is not our own—and these are necessary to participate meaningfully in political life." Conchitina Cruz in conversation with Ivy Alvarez • Cordite Poetry Review

Doireann Ni Ghriofa Poetry Ireland Review

"In a recent interview, Li-young Lee commented, ‘I think poetry is the mind of God. All the great poems that I love seem to me to all have that little ingredient. You feel like you’re in the presence of the mind of God.’ Such utterances tend to scare people on this side of the Atlantic; people might agree with Lee’s comments but they would be unlikely to say them. And Lee, who is much lauded on his side of the Great Pond, is not afraid to embrace the vatic." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

James Galvin The Manchester Review

"Oddly enough, “I Shall Be Free” shares with [Robert Frost's] “Dedication” the distinction of never having been performed: it is one of very few songs from an officially released album which Dylan has never sung in concert." Daniel Karlin TLS

Paul Batchelor The Compass

"If there can be such a person as the darling of poetry, that person is currently Elizabeth Bishop. ‘Darling’, I accept, is a somewhat patronising term, but I use it as a means of characterising the degree of fondness that has developed around her work. As a poet she is often ‘cherished’, and has achieved the billing that publicists, marketing departments and blurb writers prize above all others: she is ‘beloved’." Simon Armitage PN Review

Louise Gluck Threepenny Review

"He sought to be both Virgil and Dante: at once an imperturbable tour guide to our age of horrors, and a pensive and troubled spiritual seeker. It’s a particular quality of tonal slipperiness that makes Lowell’s greatest poems so enthralling: just when we seem to be tiring of his rhetorical and imagistic bombast, he suddenly offers statements of disarming candor." David Wojahn Kenyon Review

Dermot Healy Gallery

"The culture at large really wants to convince young writers that the writing itself is the last thing that matters." Ange Mlinko FSG

"To respond to Logan’s essay truly on Logan’s terms requires not that I defend Vuong, nor even attack Logan. It requires that I engage with the ideas that Vuong represents to Logan, which have larger consequences for all writers of color, and implicates far more reviewers than Logan." Paisley Rekdal • Asian-American Writers' Workshop

Justin Quinn The Manchester Review

"You start out believing that poetry is either self-expression or memoir (not to denigrate personal experience—our individual lives are of monumental importance to each of us). But gradually you end up knowing that the great texts issue from a larger, deeper, more communal body of—well, “knowledge” is a puny word to describe it. It’s a kind of transpersonal experience. And you can’t get there without a slow, laborious, time-consuming effort of reading and re-reading. It’s the re-reading that has mattered most to me—realizing that things I read in school 20 or 30 years ago are only now making sense to me." Ange Mlinko Lithub

Michael Prior The Manchester Review

"Here are a few of the different things that happen in the book: God takes a stroll through postwar Paris; drunken soldiers pull over a bus in Ghana; two vapid uptalking young women discuss their sexy Halloween costumes; a small-town reporter catalogues a summer’s worth of car accidents; a Japanese grandfather recreates his rural homeland in a hospital room; a teenager hears rumours about something called the internet; a young girl in Austria imagines setting up her widowed grandmother with a former Nazi." Richard Sanger • The Walrus

Doireann Ni Ghriofa Irish Times

"If [John] O’Donnell’s is a populous literary imagination, John F Deane’s is much more a continuing dialogue between self and soul, in which the narrative voice strikes always an unabashedly high tone. Against the desiccated, hyper-ironised, and textually self-pleasuring tendency in contemporary verse, Deane’s Dear Pilgrims (Carcanet Press) comes as something of a shock. It is serious, veering towards solemn, and given to abstract gestures and apostrophes." Caitriona O'Reilly Irish Times

D.A. Powell The Manchester Review

"In the beginning, there is polyphony, false starts, botched experiments, and mixed motives. Usually." Paul Batchelor on Geoffrey Hill Poetry

"Ronda posits nature as a remaindered category of poetic thinking. A non-dominant cultural form, poetry might best represent what capitalism has spoiled. The analogy between poetic and natural remainders that determines Ronda’s choice of texts is original." Jean-Thomas Tremblay LARB

"You must understand that art is nothing to these men, nor history. The penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred. They have the specious present of the barbarian. Art in this century demands a sense of the tragic dignity of history. These poor bastards are stuck in the last third of the 19th century and I swear they don’t know that anything happened before that." Donald Hall • Paris Review

Terrance Hayes The Baffler

"“A BAME critic is far less likely to read such poets as straightforwardly authentic – a favoured construction of white reviewers often”, [Sandeep Parmar] told me when I interviewed her for the website Write Out Loud. “It is tiring and disappointing and sometimes infuriating to see poets of colour read so simplistically, without enough [of the] attention to literariness and aesthetic choices that white poets are afforded.”" Jade Cuttle TLS

Helen Mort Poetry Review

"The question of connection between the writing implements and the writing itself is a fascinating one. Henry James, in the novels he composed after rheumatism in his right wrist forced him to give up handwriting, can undoubtedly be overheard dictating those ever-rolling sentences to his typist. He admitted the effect himself, and noted that he eventually came to depend on the noise made by the machine as background to his creative flow. Francis reminds us that keyboards make demands that are literally digital, and may be painful (“the strain of Q in the little finger”) – at least for anyone aspiring beyond the horribly amateurish, but tempting, two-fingered approach." Carol Rumens Guardian

"Viewed historically, as poetry written in relation to the spatialised moment of Olson, what The Double Dream of Spring allows us to configure, in our own geographically fraught condition, is a language of space in which movement, not belonging, is the principle of articulation." David Herd • Cordite

Donald Hall NYT

"In a 1983 essay, “Poetry and Ambition,” Mr. Hall began it by saying, “I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.” He went on to assail much of the poetry world, finding mediocrity there, or what he calls the “McPoem.”" NYT on Donald Hall "“None of us knew we would ever publish a book, but we took it very seriously. We would stay up late arguing over whether one poem was good enough to go in our magazine. It was incredibly stimulating. We argued all the time.”" Donald Hall Irish Times "By age 14, he had decided to become a poet, inspired after a conversation with a fellow teen versifier who declared, 'It is my profession.' 'I had never heard anyone speak so thrilling a sentence,' Hall remembered." Daily Mail / Guardian "Hall’s whole-animal approach to writing — leaving no parts unused or wasted — recalls the poem he turned into his most popular children’s book, “Ox-Cart Man,” in which nothing is wasted in a farmer’s repetitive cycle of manufacture and market." Heller McAlpin Washington Post

Kim Mahood Cordite

"But when Michael Hartnett says “The act of poetry is a rebel act”, readers will often, depending on their politics, mentally head off to the nearest barricade or place a disgusted call to (poetry) Crimestoppers." David Wheatley • Irish Times

"The troubling possibility that my desire to be a poet had similarly been complicated by a desire to be desired became the catalyst for some poems of mine in which the poet and the muse are engaged in conflicts that take the form of domestic arguments. While these poems are predictably read as autobiographical narratives of home life, the struggle depicted was an internal one. It was also aesthetic: I was beginning to understand that one doesn’t have to write poems that will please anyone, nor does one have to prettify, or even illuminate, one’s ‘self’ in them." Kathryn Maris Poetry London

Sally Ball Scoundrel Time

"We soon realize interesting contrasts, or rather, interesting asynchronies – in Empire and post-Empire Britain, or a modern Greece that is too often (mis)understood in relation to the classical world, and its inheritance. Some relationships may seem lopsided; the one with Homer going back to Chapman, imports and negotiations of modernist values through Seferis and other poets of his generation." Paschalis Nikolaou • Greek Agenda News

Daniel Bosch Harvard Review

"It is common practice now in reviews to talk only about ‘the speaker’ of a poem, rather than the poet, but Who is Mary Sue? is so focused on this subject, drawing on so many different sources, that it is a useful milestone in the discussion of authorial selfhood in poems, and particularly in lyric poetry." Chrissy Williams Poetry London

Colette Bryce Poetry London

"Adorno, it seems, is beyond criticism, and indeed “as Adorno says. . .” is an orthodoxy of the current graduate classroom in Anglophone countries, though not at all in his native Germany. If you want to make a sophisticated Marxist intervention in a discussion of how to understand Keston Sutherland’s poetry, invoke the name Adorno! And watch your “questions” become more and more intriguingly “unanswerable.”" Marjorie Perloff Chicago Review

Julian Stannard Magma

"Poetry thrives in the digital age because it is “a form of resistance, … an insistence on private truth and fantasy”." Magdalena Kay on Derek Mahon DRB

"The poet’s back story, as Hollywood would call it, is so affecting it gets in the way. The poetry might develop into something richer and stranger, given a chance; but Vuong’s appetite for pathos; his giddy, off-kilter images; and his painful eagerness suggest how much work he has yet to do." William Logan • New Criterion

Chelsey Minnis Stockholm Review of Literature

"The transition from poems to novels happened because I’d reached a dead end in poetry. ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ used me up and when I tried to write poems afterwards I felt like a jobbing writer (and there’s no worse crime, in my opinion, than writing something which doesn’t need to be written). So I gave up on the poems and then, suddenly, I was writing a novel. I’ve always wanted to write a novel." Katharine Kilalea Granta

Omar Sakr Antic

"Perhaps, as our poets get older, and bodies let them, and us, down, such sequences become more prevalent: Jo Shapcott, Julia Darling and Carol Rumens have written about this from the female point of view. O’Neill, always conscious of his context within a family, writes with the sensitivity we’ve come to expect from him about the effect his own cancer diagnosis has on, not only him, but on those closest to him." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

Lawrence Joseph Commonweal

"Some of Thomas’s most arresting poetry emerges from the clash of his religious and his nationalist impulses. In a small poetic drama, “The Minister,” a young pastor comes to an isolated farm community with dreams of sparking a revival. His idealism is soon dashed: “I began a Bible class; / But no one came / … I opened the Bible and expounded the Word / To the flies and spiders, as Francis preached to the birds.”" Peter J. Leithart • First Things

A.E. Stallings New Criterion

Ada Limon Cortland Review

"At a moment when arguments rage about poetry’s competing responsibilities to a community and to the solitary dream and vision, [Paula] Meehan reminds us that it is possible to take both sides: proud to have seen the “changed relationship to hierarchical ideas around the canon and who makes it, who shakes it”, she is also clear that “poetry is not sociology, poetry is not history”." John McAuliffe Irish Times

Hera Lindsay Bird The Spinoff

"Even in Marsden the extraordinary could happen, apparently. Staring out of that window every night I developed a new sense of the world, one that went beyond the factual and the informational. A sense of what it was like, and how it felt. That was the beginning of my life as a writer, even though I still didn’t know how to capture experiences in words." Simon Armitage • Guardian

Dan O'Brien And Other Poems

"The mystery, then, is how a man who had obviously studied Shakespeare closely, who was alive to the beauty of his poetry, and who was moreover no imbecile could have published such reams of ludicrous doggerel apparently in all seriousness and without any appreciation of the spectacle that he was making of himself. Insofar as he is remembered at all, it is as the McGonagall of Bournemouth; a desultorily active Cumberland Clark Memorial Society sometimes holds a dinner in his memory." Anthony Daniels • New Criterion

Fiona Benson Wild Court

"There are also a set of protective well-tempered diatribes in reaction against the anti-Olson sentiment sparked by Tom Clark’s 1991 biography Charles Olson: Allegory of a poet’s Life, which invited critiques of the poet on personal grounds as well as antipathetic views towards his work in general. Clarke’s admonitions on Olson’s behalf are staunch in their unfailing allegiance to adhering to accuracy towards the work itself." Patrick James Dunagan 4Square Review

Henri Cole The Nation

"‘A Part Song’ opened with the line ‘You principle of song, what are you for now?’ and this ‘for’, as in Emily Berry, is as unignorable as the loved, lost bones. These poems are written in spite of the embarrassment, the gaucheness and excess of the collision between emotion and thought, pieced together through voices which say the only things possible, as well as they can." Declan Ryan The White Review

Paul Muldoon TLS

"If I’m somewhat dubious of the more overt claims of these poems–what Keats might have called “a palpable design on us”–I’m won over again and again by their urgency, their resonant cries that break historical silences with song." Danielle Chapman Yale Review

"My friend, several months before he died, asked if he could request a favour of me and, mindful of the extraordinary demands he made from time to time, I said it depended on what that favour was. ‘When I die,’ he whispered, ‘I want you to plunge a dagger into my heart.’ It would have to be a dagger, of course, a poetical blade, and not an ordinary serrated kitchen knife." Marius Kociejowski PN Review

Mallory Hasty Nonsite

"Mostly what awaits the poet is posthumous oblivion. Maybe there will be a young man in Hamburg, or Munich, or possibly Vienna, for whom my German translations will be for a while important — and might just contribute to him becoming a German language poet with Irish leanings." Matthew Sweeney Irish Examiner

Timothy Donnelly Cortland Review

"In 2007 a small selection of twenty-two poems was declassified and published in translation as Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak. The vast majority of the poems, however, remains under lock in a military facility in Virginia. The reason was reported in a Wall Street Journal front-page article shortly before the publication of the collection, viz. that “poetry presents a special risk, and DOD standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language” (Dreazen 2007). Wary of secret messages hidden in the imagery, alliterations, personifications – the entire poetic dimension of language – the military refused to declassify the remaining body of literature. And because of their perceived threat to national security, the poems were translated by linguists with security clearances rather than by professional translators of poetry. Whether silenced or deformed, the Guantánamo poems make visible the degree to which fear of language and the attempt control language continue to be central elements of the war effort." Anders Engberg Pedersen boundary 2

Paul Muldoon Poets.org

"Serious and engaged critique of the kind that [Peter] Riley writes is vital to contemporary poetry, but he is mistaken in identifying the activity of the network only with the types of translation described in his review." Zoe Skoulding Poetry Wales

Henri Michaux, tr Richard Sieburth Poetry

"When people talk about my book being provocative, it’s funny to me, because it’s really a trojan horse of sentimentality. I feel like I’ve put a leather jacket on over a Laura Ashley pyjama set and got away with it." Hera Lindsay Bird Observer

Kayo Chingonyi Poetry International

"His work stretches from intimate explorations of family and marriage to considerations of nationhood and identity. But his forensic mind has paid closest attention to the struggle of the individual with the ordeals of the human predicament." Gerard Smyth Irish Times "Kinsella’s Táin transmits something of the austerity of the Irish, prickly and black as the contorted balckthorn bush, with its sudden explosions of bright blossom. It was in this language the bards expressed what we were, and in rendering it into English Kinsella has bent the language to his purpose and kept it, somehow, in the vernacular." Mary O'Malley Irish Times

Eleanor Wilner Scoundrel Time

"It is an economy for a publisher not to edit." Michael Schmidt PN Review "It’s also clear [...] that absences distort presences. If past achievement is erased, present achievement can only exist in a awed context. For any editor, that’s a case to answer." Eavan Boland Poetry Ireland

Chelsey Minnis Granta

"And so, mindful of “the Goddess Dullness squatting on our pages” (referred to elsewhere as the “daily meh”), [Leontia] Flynn breathes the new life of an entirely contemporary voice into a seemingly traditional stanzaic structure. That the elegy is not “Heaneyesque” in style testifies both to the generosity of Heaney’s example and to the sureness of Flynn’s talent." Paul Bachelor New Statesman

Thomas Kinsella PN Review

"Through [Thomas Kinsella's] New Poems 1973 and the books that followed, I learned to believe in my own reality and work from its rudiments." Harry Clifton Irish Times

"The tonal register too, slides between earnest confessional and ribald play. This makes for a dizzying, and sometimes jarring, progression. Nonetheless, I found myself unfastened by this aspect of Soho (not by its experimentation with affront), but by the discomforting force of its confessional provocation. It reminds me of the anxieties that were raised in the wake of the MeToo movement that saw survivors of sexual violence undertake public acts of self-nomination en masse. What does it mean to speak of shame? How much speaking is too much?" Nell Osborne The Manchester Review

Rachel Hadas Hudson Review

"Reading through the work of a writer like [Henri] Cole, one finds it inevitable to consider the issue of progression, or lack of it. The Confessionalist who survives and thrives to a certain age no longer finds his or her anguish as dire or newsworthy as before. In some ways the long-term conundrum of Confessionalism might be the question, How much can I do with my personal unease?" Tony Hoagland Poet Lore / Poetry Daily

DA Powell Poetry

"The reward of reading through this long book is watching the process unfold, as Plath gains agency, self-confidence, and adeptness in her lifelong project of self-fashioning. Due to the autobiographical nature of her poetry and fiction, her letters should therefore be seen not as auxiliary to her creative work, but as part of it. Yet combing any particular letter for “the truth” about Plath presents challenges, for The Letters of Sylvia Plath makes clear that she crafted different versions of herself for different correspondents, variously including and occluding details about her experiences and shifting her tone and style, depending on whom she addressed." Meg Schoerke Hudson Review

Alistair Noon Fortnightly Review

"To the extent West’s music continues to give expression to feelings of black pride and self-empowerment, it will do so in defiance of Kanye’s newfound Trumpism, just as Pound’s poetry often went against the grain of his fascism." Jeet Heer • New Republic

Charles Simic Threepenny Review

"For Baudelaire, nothing in the teeming city is beneath the notice of poetry, and so it is for Symmons Roberts." Katharine Towers The Compass

Zach Savich Iowa Review

"However there is now a growing clamour urging policy-makers to get a grip and start implementing the type of measures that were ultimately put in place following the last upheaval of this nature; the Gutenberg revolution in the fifteenth century. It took time, but eventually censorship, licensing, copyright and other protections for individual privacy were put in place. We now need to move much faster than in the first information revolution, beginning with an urgent refutation of Mr Zuckerberg’s arrogant assertion that “privacy is no longer a social norm”." John Fanning DRB

Eric Pankey Diagram

"Whether the first person here is a persona adopted by Phillips, or the empirical Phillips, himself, is a moot point; Phillips’ taut and slightly driven syntax certainly feels personal. And what the poem offers is an exploration of a kind of truth. That Phillips is so successful in persuading the reader that she is reading truths is down to the precision and elegance of that syntax. The reader is taken in at the start of the sentence, the verse paragraph, the whole poem and then let go at the end. To read Carl Phillips is, as has been said by others, to be read by him. Phillips’ querulous, querying syntax seems to inhabit part of the human condition." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

Mimi Khalvati The Compass

"I didn’t realize until recently that you could record on the iPhone, and I suddenly thought, “Maybe I should record all of my day, every day.” Who wouldn’t like to listen to a perfect recording of their own life, as it was 10 years ago?" Hannah Sullivan LARB

Denise Riley SPL

"To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality. Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black. Much contemporary art is irrelevant because it takes no note of this and childishly delights in color." Fred Moten Queen Mob's Teahouse

Amy Key Granta

"The sorrows of poets are legion, and their failures commonplace. Why does the case of Elizabeth Jennings deserve special consideration?" Dana Gioia • First Things

Juliana Spahr Harpers

"By the time of the Coventry trip, Larkin had abandoned more than one third novel. He was also writing the poems, collected the following year in The Less Deceived, that would make his reputation: “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” “Reasons for Attendance,” “Toads,” “Church-Going,” and of course “I Remember, I Remember.” (The year of Larkin’s trip, the manuscript was rejected by the Dolmen Press in Dublin as “too self pitying” and “too sexy.”)" William Logan New Criterion

Giosuè Carducci, tr. David Yezzi New Criterion

"Not only does our digital living condition us profoundly, and by the stealthiest increments — so that with every new upgrade, every app, we are not only further empowered, but also more deeply reliant — but it also creates in us an estrangement, a sense of void." Sven Birkerts Aeon

Forrest Gander New Yorker

"To some extent the revival can be seen as a vogue among poets, a fashion fuelled by the popularity and visibility of Heaney and Michael Longley, two of its main proponents. In the late 1980s and early 1990s both were instrumental in bringing the classical revival from the Irish stage into poetry." Florence Impens Irish Times

Eva Bourke + Tom French Irish Times

"Tom French has much to say but admirably it is often on behalf of others. These are poems without any pretensions, with a sturdiness to the diction and playful inclinations such as in the poem “Angler” in which a road-measuring exercise with a reel of tape is compared to the angler reeling in his catch. He mixes plain statement with imaginative and often startling leaps and U-turns that make the reader sit up." Gerard Smyth DRB "The narrative tone of a Tom French poem is immediately recognisable: detached but sympathetic; sensuously nostalgic; watchful; alert to the serendipities of time, place, and logos; acutely aware of the local with its twin taproots in history and landscape." Caitriona O'Reilly Irish Times

JD McClatchy Poetry

"While a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Hamill won a $500 for producing the best student literary magazine in the country, and used that money to team up with Tree Swenson and Bill O’Daly to found Copper Canyon Press." Ian Dreiblatt Melville House

"Today I set out to devise the thing I would have actually turned in to W. H. Auden if I had been in his class at the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association (better known today as the 92nd Street Y) sixty-two years ago." Anthony Madrid • The Paris Review

"According to Nadel, the decisive shift toward his future singing career came at a party at Frank Scott’s house, when Cohen introduced the music of Bob Dylan to the Montreal poets. Listening to Subterranean Homesick Blues, the writers didn’t know what to think. Al Purdy, classy as ever, called it an awful bore and stomped out of the room. But “Cohen listened intently, solemnly announcing that he would become the Canadian Dylan, a statement all dismissed.”" Derek Webster • CNQ

Stephen Sexton Southword

"Flarf was and is many things—a movement, a method, a friend group, an in-joke, an email list. But mostly Flarf was a product of a keenly-felt transitional moment, when the various institutions that glued American poetry together were soaked in the solvent fluids of emergent social media. Poetry, and discourse about it, was no longer beholden to the moderating temporality of the print journal, the gatekeeping of the university MFA program, or the fierce tribalism of the city-based avant-garde scene." Jasper Bernes Chicago Review

Doireann Ní Ghríofa The Poetry Review

"That Shakespeare did not (as far as we know) plan land-grabs and massacres in Ireland or anywhere else does not alter the fact that his poetical figurations share a lot with Spenser’s. Or may it not in the end be poetry itself which is excoriated as authoritarian, or more commonly “elitist”, or at any rate poetry which values the extending perspectives of its own ancestry and enjoys echoic ornamentation. This would include a lot of contemporary poetry and, I would think, a lot of Irish poetry in both languages." Peter Riley Fortnightly Review

Fady Joudah Scoundrel Time

"Contemporary Anglophone radical poetry absorbs and rejects the imperative to be commensurate with the environment of its making, an imperative made with no greater utopian assiduity than in Whitman’s verse, because the world it must recognize as its own is built upon the systematic exploitation and indentured suffering of those without whom it would not exist." Joe Luna Chicago Review

Tess Jolly The Compass

"Reticence may be the déformation professionnelle of the poet. In Auden’s case, this seemed all the more likely because much of his work, in utter simplicity, arose out of the spoken word, out of idioms of everyday language—like “Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.” This kind of perfection is very rare; we find it in some of the greatest of Goethe’s poems, and it must exist in most of Pushkin’s works, because their hallmark is that they are untranslatable." Hannah Arendt • Literary Hub

Solman Shariz Poetry

"This is poetry as “a middle zone between the news and prayer,” as the literary scholar Jahan Ramazani has put it: poetry that comments on the world and at the same time bends language to hope for the possibility of another. Its complexity is sustaining, giving us something to think about that changes as we think about it, and as we hope for conditions to change." David B Hobbs The Nation

"Digital commentary, Bury writes, can cover the source text like kudzu vines, “until only its faint outline remains”. As with book reviews replacing the book itself, now succeeding waves of commentary can overwhelm the source more rapidly than can be kept up with, which has led to the rise of the “take of takes”: summarised aggregations of the responses so far. It can be oppressive to think about how much of the cultural conversation it is impossible to keep up with." Chris Power New Statesman

"A language of reviewing which might reach for phrases such as ‘beautifully controlled’, ‘body of work’, and a general slew of self-gratifying slippage between the verbal and the corporeal, is inadequate to Kingdom of Gravity." Vahni Capildeo on Nick Makoha The Compass

Claudine Toutoungi Guardian

"Which is to say, I don’t think I had any grasp of the staggering range and history of British writing, apart from who made headlines or got attention in the United States because of awards or notoriety or big reviews. Zadie Smith and Simon Armitage are the only two names that immediately come to mind as I try to recall who I had heard of prior to arriving in London." R.A. Villanueva • Oxford Poetry

sam sax Gulf Coast

"Osip Mandelstam’s life and work are seamlessly united; his speeches and deeds form a singular impression of wholeness, of joyful integrity and inner freedom. “Everything has become heavier and more massive,” he wrote in his essay “On the Nature of the Word”; “thus man must become harder . . . the sacred character of poetry arises out of the conviction that man is harder than everything else in the world.” Osip demonstrated his own adamantine hardness—the “deep bedrock of principles,” in Nadezhda’s words, “which set him apart from anyone of his own or later generations”—when he meddled, on pain of death, in the case of an imprisoned art historian; when he intervened to save five old men facing execution, sending Bukharin a volume of his poetry with an inscription to the effect that “every word here is against what you are going to do”; and especially when, taking the measure of a Goliath like no other the world has ever seen, he weighed little stones of poetry—dense verses of formal power, earthy thematic richness, and striking imagery—against the immense totality of the USSR." Jacob Howland New Criterion

Thom Gunn Poetry Archive

"I'm not sure where or when he gave his first poetry reading but he was no less nervous. Afraid that, if he took the time to read slowly and pause occasionally, he'd lose the audience, he rushed. He didn't want to sound too actorish, too Dylan Thomasy. He didn't like his voice, too high and thin; his accent, too English. It was a wonder, then, to witness the Extreme Makeover: he got to be so good! His voice was high and thin but its limitations allowed him to dramatize just enough." Mike Kitay Threepenny Review

Leontia Flynn Poetry Ireland Review

"The long eponymous poem is a masterful depiction of motherhood during the Troubles as a perpetually heightened state of vigilance and vulnerability. The quiet “rhythms of a culchie life” on the farm are disturbed suddenly and repeatedly by the jarring words broadcast on the radio, which seems to come alive in the poem’s opening: “The radio hoots and mutters, hoots and mutters / out of the dark, each morning of my childhood.”" Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado DRB

"“I am ashamed to say I do not understand the poem clearly,” my student wrote. When I write back to her, I offer explanations about confusing lines and send her articles on Modernism and symbolism and World War I, but I also tell her there is no need to feel ashamed." Emily Frisella • The Rumpus

"Much of Zagajewski’s mulling takes place on his long walks around the city. He shares his bibliography for walking, recommending Italian poet Eugenio Montale, Greek diplomat and poet George Seferis, the Czech poet Vladimir Holan. One can almost hear his Polish-accented drawl as he writes, “And so we live, torn between brief explosions of meaning and patient wandering through the plains of ordinary days.”" Cynthia Haven Weekly Standard

Amina Saïd, tr Marilyn Hacker Words Without Borders

"In part three of the poem, (Sarah) Arvio comes up with an interesting solution when she translates the fifth line as “I have seen the gray rain chase the waves” (Kinnell translates this as “I’ve seen gray rains fleeing toward the sea” and Spender and Gili’s version is “I have seen grey showers move towards the waves”). Arvio’s single-syllable words suggest panic; in the meter, it sounds like a good line of English poetry—T.S. Eliot might have been proud of it—rather than a translation. Since both the rain and the waves are in movement, “chase” serves to emphasize this and suggests also that something urgent is at stake, even if in the original Spanish the rain is running away from something as well as running toward the sea." Colm Toibin NYRB

"Whitman, long recognized for his candid treatment of the body and sexuality, was also the quintessential poet of disability and death. As a volunteer nurse in the Civil War hospitals in Washington, D.C., he visited, according to his own estimate, between 80,000 and 100,000 wounded or sick soldiers over the course of four years." David S. Reynolds • NYRB

Adam Crothers Manchester Review

"People presume there is a lot of structure in this structure because I think some of the best poetry I have ever read, it goes beyond the bounds of standard grammar. But when you know the grammar really well you can utilise what you like to get the message across." Joe Schmidt Irish Times

"In the far future, when the only readers who cherish and puzzle over Lucie Brock-Broido’s poems are those who never met her, those readers will surely try to imagine what she must have been like in person." Stephanie Burt • Paris Review

"The last time I saw Lucie was at the Star Market in Porter Square. She had called me a few weeks earlier to say she had a brain tumor and was dying. She said it in the same way as she had said many things over the last thirty-plus years, with characteristic theatricality." Askold Melnyczuk • Agni