“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
Prayer Book of the Anxious by Josephine Yu (Elixir Press, 2016). Letters from Limbo by Jeanne Marie Beaumont (Cavan Kerry, 2016). “Oh, but the heart isn’t fooled / by the gorgeous lies of poems,” Josephine Yu declares toward the … Read More
Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf Press, 2017). Cold Pastoral by Rebecca Dunham (Milkweed Editions, 2017). Layli Long Soldier’s first collection tasks itself with writing back to and simultaneously interrogating official political speech. Whereas, as poem and collection, … Read More
Believe What You Can by Marc Harshman (Vandalia Press, 2016). Two Worlds Exist by Yehoshua November (Orison Books, 2016). Arsonville by David Blair (Western Michigan University Press, 2016). Embracing change in Appalachia. In his second full-length collection of … Read More
In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae (Wesleyan University Press, 2017). As I read Shane McCrae’s In the Language of My Captor, I thought of the Romanian poet Paul Celan writing in German, his first tongue … Read More
It’s been twenty-three years since the publication of Mary Stewart Hammond’s first book, Out of Canaan. Hammond’s second, Entering History, is proof that the poet’s consciousness or “moral intelligence” has been at work these last two decades, and we … Read More
“The wind comes through from that teeming world,” Talvikki Ansel writes in “Glaze,” a poem that appears part-way through her luminous, clear-eyed third collection Somewhere in Space, winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. The … Read More
The stories of Meghan Kenny’s debut collection Love Is No Small Thing follow a diverse range of narrators driven by a shared longing for intimacy. Characters struggle to navigate through the ever-complicated terrain of romantic and familial relationships. In … Read More
In Ishion Hutchinson’s second collection, House of Lords and Commons, we hear the voices of Port Antonio, Jamaica, with its disparity of race and wealth, remembered and re-envisioned by the poet. The book opens, in the poem “Station,” with … Read More
Most of the poems in Gabriella Klein’s wise and beautifully strange debut collection, Land Sparing, are spoken—as so many contemporary lyric poems are—from the point of view of a first-person speaker, an “I.” But what a capacious and compassionate … Read More
To a Catholic schoolchild—baptized, confirmed, slouch-shouldered at weekly masses and fully imbued with the weight of Catholic guilt—perhaps no threat is as solemnly terrifying as that of excommunication. To be cast out from a community that so thoroughly defines … Read More