Outside Is the Ocean by Matthew Lansburgh (University of Iowa Press, 2017). Winner of the 2017 Iowa Short Fiction Award, Matthew Lansburgh’s first collection possesses the satisfying reach and depth of a novel. The fractured chronology of its … Read More
Come West and See by Maxim Loskutoff (W.W. Norton & Company, 2018). It is election season in America again, which affords the country another unsettling visual and numerical representation of just how deeply and irreparably we seem to be … Read More
Guide to Greece by George Kalogeris (Louisiana State University Press, 2018). The title of George Kalogeris’s latest collection of poems is a nod to an ancient travelogue in ten books written by a Greek man named Pausanias in … Read More
Thomas Bernhard: Collected Poems, translated by James Reidel (Seagull Books, 2017). Thomas Bernhard’s prose has an implacable forward motion, driven by repetition and elaboration. A sentence in his final novel, Extinction, is structured in the same way as … Read More
No Small Gift by Jennifer Franklin (Four Way Books, 2018). Jennifer Franklin’s No Small Gift explores ideas of love and punishment, and the way the two can fluctuate and intertwine. That is to say, sometimes love ends in … Read More
Like The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, her collection steeped in Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maggie Smith’s Good Bones is preoccupied with the perils and mysteries of the rites of passage a child must make on the way to … Read More
The pervasiveness of a father’s ghost in José Angel Araguz’s Until We Are Level Again reminds us that old memories that threaten our equilibrium also provide, in poems, breakthroughs for the haunted. The ghost for Araguz is twofold: his father … Read More
There’s no ignoring the body, whether in the form of “a cough that was odd,” “a callus ripped open,” or “a peach pit wet and red as the cancer they’ve removed.” Fred Marchant records these physical moments in his … Read More
I once heard the poet Jane Hirshfield say that all true poems are compassionate at heart. To test her theory, she explained, she thought of the least compassionate-seeming poem she knew: Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse.” It passed … Read More
In their new books, Cold Storage and Spill, poets Keith Althaus and Kelle Groom, who both happen to hail from Cape Cod, are not isolated by its geographies—instead, each holds a dialogue with and pushes out from them. There … Read More
“Reasonably close.” Twelve years in the making, and this is how National Book Award-winning poet David Ferry rates his translation, out this September, of Virgil’s Aeneid. The Aeneid—that 10,000-line, 2,000-year-old epic poem in twelve books singing imperial Rome’s mythic … Read More
Definitions and usages of the word “time” as a noun take up two tightly printed, small-font columns in Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary. I’m not sure exactly when this 2,127-page beast (not including various appendices) came into my possession, … Read More