Jay Aquinas Thompson: Re-Reading Jose Perez Beduya

The five-year-old poetry book can be a lonely thing. After a hoped-for hothouse blossoming of critical conversation dies down and the book is no longer taught...
Read More‘Poetry is its own not following’

Before poetry got me a job, it intellectually and spiritually changed my world. Poetry introduced me to the person I have a child with and to my best friends...
Read MoreBy its very definition, Instapoetry has no time…

Instagram was developed out of a project titled “Send the Sunshine” at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab...
Read MoreThe Literature of Cold by Eric D. Lehman

Many years ago, influenced and inspired by several years of reading Arctic and Antarctic literature, I took a January hike in the northern mountains.
Read MoreThe Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Virginia Woolf

If it is true that there are books written to escape from the present moment, and its meanness and its sordidity...
Read More2 Cups Tea

Poet Joanne Kyger died last year on March 22 at the age of 82, leaving behind a long list of published and unpublished books...
Read MoreMilk and Money

In October 2016 The Bookseller reported the highest-ever annual sales of poetry books, ‘both in volume and value’.
Read MoreGerardo Muñoz on Wilson Bueno

That the philosopher or the novelist has rarely withstood the moment of shipwreck in the unfolding of metaphoricity as basic substratum for existence...
Read More‘South Asian speculative fiction has its own monsters to slay’

Somewhere in Britain, a dark wizard has gathered his forces, mustering an army that will hold a magical world in thrall. And somewhere in the future, fertile women are enslaved, their bodies turned to the service of a god-fearing state for whom children are the most precious resource.
Read More“New times elicit new genres”

Belarusian journalist and author Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work documenting the lives of Soviet and post-Soviet citizens.
Read MoreRime of the Algae Gatherer by Jessica Sequeira

In his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge describes a ‘rotting sea’ full of ‘slimy things.’ What is a slimy thing?
Read MoreEric D. Lehman on Edmund Gosse

Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments was anonymously published in 1907 and faced immediate backlash in England due to its apparent criticism of Victorian morality.
Read More‘I was happy living on my own’

The apartment was a dive. There was no way to defrost the freezer. It was just a solid block of ice. When you opened the door, it was like looking out a small window after an avalanche.
Read MoreThe Art of Fiction by Willa Cather

One is sometimes asked about the "obstacles" that confront young writers who are trying to do good work...
Read MoreKevin Hong on Critical Assembly

Thirty-three years in the making, Critical Assembly details the thoughts and experiences of forty-six people involved in the creation of the atomic bomb.
Read MoreMary McCarthy’s Factuality

In the winter of 1960, Mary McCarthy—the writer whom Norman Mailer once described as “our saint, our umpire, our lit arbiter, our broadsword”...
Read MoreIllegal Literature

It was by happy coincidence that my review copy of David S. Roh’s Illegal Literature arrived in my mailbox the day I started sending out permission requests for reuse of material for a forthcoming manuscript.
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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