Articles

Gray Barker helped create UFO mythology from his home in rural West Virginia. In his poems, he channels the repression and paranoia that stalked postwar America.

For Bruce M. Wright—a lawyer, judge, and poet who lived through Jim Crow—words held worldmaking force.

José Emilio Pacheco, one of Mexico’s most celebrated poets, rejected nostalgia even as he remained transfixed by the passage of time.

Two poetry collections reckon with the grief of losing a mother.

Michael Ondaatje is best known as a novelist, but his poems attest to his career-long instinct for invention.  

On the imperfection of elegies. 

An unlikely dissident inspired by the classics, Tomas Venclova remains Lithuania’s greatest poet.

The Idea of an Entire Life, by Billy-Ray Belcourt, is at once a love letter to poetry and queer Indigeneity—and a sustained act of refusal. 

On Nate Dogg, Black barbershops, and writer’s block.

Everette Maddox—a New Orleans poet and barfly—wrote on the backs of napkins and menus. Largely overlooked, his poems are funny, devastating shots of wayward genius.  

Its whitewashed facade gleamed in the sun, camouflaging the sinister history behind its walls.

Meet Richard Hell: former punk scourge, avowed nihilist, and genteel man of letters. 

I have found that to translate is to converse deeply, and to discover how much we have in common with those we may feel far from. 

Susan Howe's work distills the entire American poetic tradition. 

On the poetry and activism of Breyten Breytenbach.

I loved the South, but I left it. I think I always planned to. 

Her poems drew power from contradiction: ferocity held in lyric restraint, grief braided with humor, the sacred brushing against the profane.

For the beloved queer trickster Kevin Killian, pop culture was always entangled with death. 

For Larry, poetry was the molecular music of life.

The Poems of Seamus Heaney entombs him as the bard of a fading liberal order.